LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF A^TEKICA. 



THE SCIENCE 



OF^ 



EDUCATION 



By 



HENRY N. DAY 



AUTHOR OF ART OF DISCOURSE, ENGLISH LITEKATURE, ^ESTHETICS, 

"science of THOUGHT," 'MENTAL SCIENCE," ETC. 



■^ 




IVISON, BLAKEMAN, & COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 



\ 



^^ 



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COPYRIGHT, 1889. 
By henry N. day. 



E. B. Sheldon & Co., 

Electrotypers and Printers, 

New Haven, Uonn. 



PREFACE 



The teacher certainly should be master of his 
art. He should know what he is called and 
undertakes to do, and how he is to do it wisely 
and well. He should have a full outline in ideal 
of his work ever present in his mind — an ideal 
which, however rudimental at the first, is yet a 
full-membered germ that can be fostered up into 
a rich and symmetrical maturity. To the thou- 
sands of earnest and conscientious educators of 
the day a concise and simple presentation of the 
true character of educational work may be ser- 
viceable in forming for themselves such an ideal. 
The presentation will need of course to be sum- 
mary in its character — brief while yet comprehen- 
sive, dealing more with principles and sugges- 
tions than with detailed applications, but fully 
covering the field. It should itself exemplify in 
its form, so far as may be, the work which it 
expounds, at least in being in the fullest sense 

iii 



iv PREFACE. 

exactly scientific in its method. A governing 
aim should be to exhibit the entire field of 
educational work, accurately circumscribed as a 
whole and distributed into its complementary 
parts in their due relationship and order. 

Having devoted a full threescore years of 
active .service to educational pursuits in divers 
relations, the author presents these results of his 
observation and reflection in teaching to those 
that are following on in this high and arduous 
calling with the hope that they may be both 
helpful to the educator himself and also tributary 
to the advancement of the work in which he is 
engaged. 

Henry N. Day. 

New Haven, May, 1889. 



CONTENTS, 



INTRODUCTION. 

§ I. Science of Education, defined. § 2. Three requisites 
in a scientific exposition ; — apprehension, discrimination, 
arrangement. § 3. The twofold methods of Scientific 
Apprehension : — Observation ; Logical Inference. § 4. The 
threefold methods of scientific thought : — Induction, Gen- 
eralization, Deduction. § 5. Education defined. § 6. The 
process of education. § 7. The interaction of three distinct 
factors : — the active force, the subject, the means. § 8. The 
method of the Science : — (i) the three factors engaged ; 
(2) the work effected ; (3) the end or result. 

BOOK L 

THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

Chapter I. The Teaching Factor.— § 9. Self- 
Teaching. § 10. Nature Teaching. § 11. Parental Teach- 
ing. § 12. Its leading characteristics: (i) Early begin- 
ning ; (2) Following nature ; (3) Kindly ; (4) Continuous ; 
(5) Authoritative; (6) Purposive. § 13. Its method — 
direct in example and by precept, and indirect in controlling 
outward condition or environment, companionships, the 
reading, and outer life. § 14. Technical Teaching.— Per- 
sonal qualifications of the teacher, (i) sympathetic and com- 
municative ; (2) earnest ; (3) skillful ; (4) authoritative. 
§ 15. Requisites for effective work. 

V 



VI CONTENTS. 

Chapter II. The Pupil.— § i6. The subject factor in 
the educational interaction, presenting a complement of 
capabilities. § 17. Generic capabilities, (i) Intrinsic. § 18. 
Extrinsic in diverse relationships. § 19. Specially modified 
capabilities, as in respect of age, of sex, personal idiosyncra- 
sies, condition. 

Chapter III. Means and Appliances.— § 20. Edu- 
cational Means. — Objects in object teaching. § 21. Appli- 
ances : (i) Provisions in respect of places and of times ; 
§ 22. (2) Class associations. § 23. (3) Rewards and 
Punishments. § 24. (4) Support— Household Instruction 
and Select Schools. § 25. Private Endowed Institutions. 
§ 26. State Institutions. 

BOOK II. 

EDUCATIONAL WORK.— THE INTERACTION 
OF THE EDUCATIONAL FACTORS. 

Chapter I. The Twofold Work of Education. 
— § 27. Receptive and Reactive — Nurture and Training. 
§ 28. Nurture — preparatory. § 29. Training, (i) In the 
responsive act, (2) Retention — memory proper. (3) Repro- 
duction — Imagination. § 30. Exercise. § 31. Exemplified 
in the development of the Imaginative or Reproductive 
power. 

Chapter II. The Conditions of Effective 
Work in Education.— § 32. (i) Educational work must 
be sympathetic. § 33. (2) Earnest. § 34. (3) Aiming. § 
35. (4) Developing. § 36. (5) Provident. § 37. (6) Watch- 
ful and Precautionary. § 38. (7) With recreation that is fit- 
ting, educatory, contrastive, attractive, from work to play. 

Chapter III. The Special Modifications of Edu- 
cation. — Physical Education. § 39. Union of Body with 
Spirit. § 40. Physical Education seeks best ministration to 
the whole man in subordination to the mental life. § 41. 



CONTENTS. Vll 

Recognizes law of habit. § 42. Is guided by nature and 
condition. § 43. Moital Education. — I. Esthetic — Its 
province. § 44. The Function of Form. § 45. Its two 
sides, passive or Sensibility, and active or Imagination. The 
assimilating stage. § 46. The Retentive stage. § 47. The 
Reproductive stage. § 48. The Recollecting stage. § 49. 
The proper Imaginative or Creative stage. § 50. Occasions 
for training the aesthetic function. § 51. II. Intellectual 
Education. — Its place. § 52. Analysis and genesis of an 
intellectual act. § 53. The three great movements of 
thought. § 54. The Stages of intellectual training. — i the 
inchoative or perceptive ; 2 the completed or attributive and 
proper thinking activity. § 55. Culture of the Perceptive 
faculty. § 56. Of the proper thinking faculty. 

Educational Aphorisms in Special Rudimen- 
tary Studies, i. Spelling; 2. Reading; 3. Penman- 
ship ; 4. Arithmetic. 5. Grammar as '' art of true ana 
well speaking." 

§ 57. III. Moral Education. § 58. Essential character- 
istic of the will — directive. § 59. Fundamental principle of 
morals. § 60. Threefold objects of moral activity— Self, 
Fellow-beings, God. § 61. Moral Training effected, (i) by 
exemplification ; (2) formal precepts ; (3) Enforcement of 
duty. 

BOOK III. 
EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

Chapter I. § 62. Educational Limits. 

Chapter II. § 63. Growth Periods.— Twofold law 
of educational work from consideration of growth in its 
subject, (i) It should be previsional : (2) should assure 
every step. § 64. Regulative principles of a curricidiiin. 

Chapter III. Education Periods.— § 65. Four 
periods may be noted : (i) The Kindergarten period ; 
§ 66. (2) The Primary ; § 67. (3) The Liberal ; § 68. (4) 
The Avocation or Professional Period. 



INTRODUCTION. 



§ I. A SCIENCE of Education is an orderly 
exposition of the essential nature of education 
in its several departments and processes. 

A science differs from an art in respect to its 
end or aim : — science has for its end simple knowl- 
edge ; art seeks practical skill. The facts and 
the principles are the same ; only the method 
and the form vary. 

A science of education thus looks more closely 
at the result — knowledge or ability to know — 
as it is to be effected in the learner : an art of 
education looks more at the result — skill in 
teaching — as it is to be effected in the teacher. 

Practically science and art for the most part 
freely intermingle — the principles of science read- 
ily, for purposes of convenience, taking on the form 
of rules of art. Deficiencies in knowledge and de- 
ficiencies also in language or means of communi- 
cation impose this necessity of occasional devia- 
tions from the predominant method and form 
specially proper to the science or to the art. 

§ 2. Any science worthy of the name 
involves three requisites : — 

I 



2 INTRODUCTION. 

First, a clear and distinct apprehension of the 
object or subject matter to be expounded in re- 
spect both to its intrinsic character and also to 
its relation to other kindred subjects: — 

Secondly, a clear discrimination of all the con- 
stituent attributes of this object : — and, 

Thirdly, an orderly arrangement of these 
attributes in the exposition. 

We get no proper idea of the clock until not 
only all the constituent materials are brought 
together, each part formed and finished in itself; 
not until also each is fitted into its place in rela- 
tion to the whole product and to its related 
parts. Only when the parts are all thus adjusted 
to one another does the perfect clock appear. 
So no science appears worthy of the name until 
all the parts are discriminated and adjusted in 
due relation, one to another. 

§ 3. The methods of scientific apprehension 
are twofold : — 

First, Observation, personal or through 
others : — 

Secondly, Logical Inference, or a movement of 
thought on such observation. 

§ 4. The logical methods are threefold : — 

First, by Induction, in which the observation 
of one part leads to another like part so that one 
feature or element, one fact or experience, or in 
general terms, one instance, shall answer for 
many. 

Secondly, by Generalization, in which process^ 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

a plurality of things, possessing some one char- 
acteristic in common, are gathered into a class 
on the basis of that common characteristic ; 
and, 

Thirdly, by Dedi(ctio7i, in which movement of 
thought anything found to be true of a class is 
accepted to be true of any species or individual 
of that class. 

§ 5. By Education is signified the development 
of a Jinnian being into the character determined for 
him by his nature and capabilities and by the con- 
dition in zvhich he is placed. The end in all right 
education is the perfecting of this character. 
This end is attained in the two comprehensive 
ways of right NURTURE and right TRAINING. As 
essentially active, man must be met by some fit 
objects on which his activity is to be expended 
and in these supplied objects is found the food 
or nutriment on which he is to grow. He needs 
also to be guided towards the right objects and 
in the way and the degree of exerting his activity 
on them. 

Educational science, accordingly, must appre- 
hend the character which man was designed by 
his creator to bear, both generically as common 
to the race, and specifically as belonging to the 
membership of a nation, a family, a community 
of whatever kind to which he belongs, and more- 
over individually as pertaining to the idiosyncra- 
sies of the person. It prescribes that an ideal of 
this character be ever present to shape the nurture 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

and the training. It will embrace in this consid- 
eration of the end to be reached in education 
the particular calling or pursuit in life for which 
individuals are respectively to.be educated. 

§6. The process of education, accordingly, 
ever respects a growth — an advance in right 
direction and in fullest degree from an infantile 
and so characterless potency towards the ideal 
of a perfect maturity. It seeks a continuous 
growth, inasmuch as its subject is a life that as 
a whole suffers no interruption in its onward 
course, although specific functions are engaged 
more prominently at one time and less at 
another in order that all may receive their due 
development. This growth, moreover, proceeds 
by stages, in each of which it is carried on with 
more or less of exclusiveness and of interruption. 
To each stage a wisely directed education adapts 
its training; while at the same time it secures 
that the growth at each particular stage shall be 
helpful to the growth at each subsequent stage. 
The growth of man towards the ideal of a 
perfect character is well typified in that of the 
vine that by uprooting or injudicious pruning 
may be bereft of all capability of reaching a fruit- 
ful maturity whether in itself as a whole or in 
any particular branch. Its normal condition, the 
law of its life is that of a growth that is contin- 
uous but by stages. Its wintry rest even is real 
progress. Nevertheless the most promising bud 
or shoot may be stunted or utterly fail through 



INTR OD UC TIOiV. 



5 



an untimely check, or by diversion of nurture 
or by abrupt change of treatment. 

§ 7. The process of education necessarily 
involves the interaction of three distinct ele- 
ments or factors. These elements or factors 
may be more conveniently and, indeed, more cor- 
rectly regarded as active elements or forces. 
Even although at times appearing as receptive 
and so far passive ; since they do not lose their 
essentially active nature even when receptive, as 
factors, as interacting, or producing effects, in a 
word, as real, they must be held to be essentially 
active, and therefore forces. Their rest or pas- 
siveness is that of an active nature. These three 
factors are — 

First, the Teacher ; — the proper active force in 
education ; 

Second, the Learner ; — the proper subject of 
education ; 

Third, the Means and Instruments and Condi- 
tions generally of effective education. 

§ 8. Method. — From this summary view of 
the essential character of education in respect to 
its end, means, and process as involving three dis- 
tinct factors or interacting forces, the proper 
method of unfolding the science of education 
may be readily discerned. The general theme 
being definitely outlined so that it can be intelli- 
gently apprehended and moreover being exhib- 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

ited as constituted of complementary parts which 
equally admit of definite apprehension, it shows 
itself to be a fit subject of exact scientific treat- 
ment. The science will be methodically and 
exhaustively expounded in a full and right con- 
sideration, First, of the three interacting ele- 
ments engaged in education ; — 

Secondly, of the work effected by these factors, 
as shown in its method and in its several depart- 
ments ; and. 

Thirdly, of the end in education in its respect- 
ive modifications by reason of person and of 
condition. 



BOOK I. 

THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE TEACHING FACTOR. 

§ 9. Self-Teaching. — A great part of the 
educational work in human life is done by the 
soul itself. The process begins by the very ordi- 
nances of its nature at the earliest period. It 
enlarges with growth till it becomes well-nigh 
exclusive : the mature man, becoming his own 
teacher, both selecting the food that is to nour- 
ish up his character and also disciplining his fac- 
ulties under his own guidance and control. The 
first stage is one of almost absolute dependence. 
The infant life is receptive, passively subject to 
whatever influence may come to it from without ; 
it is purely instinctive and spontaneous. Natural 
wants are the impelling, the guiding, and the con- 
trolling forces. The life seems almost all sense, 
and at first is mainly physical ; only later does it 
manifest itself as emotional or spiritual. At a sec- 

7 



8 THE FA C TORS IN ED UCA TION. 

ond stage the reflex or responsive characteristic in 
body and spirit manifests itself with the appear- 
ance of the control of habit. Still later and only 
by very slow development is it that the infant 
becomes much of a learner from its own con- 
scious teaching. More and more, however, ex- 
perience inculcates its lessons, and at last expert 
skill and self-confidence draw into its own hands 
the reins and the spur of training. Infancy, 
childhood, youth, mature manhood, thus desig- 
nate stages of self-educational growth, possessing 
each its own characteristics but passing each 
into its successor with transitional lines not 
easily traceable. 

Only a slight inspection of human life and his- 
tory thus suffices to show that man is called and 
destined to be his own teacher. This is his right, 
his duty • and his too is the responsibility of ex- 
ercising the high function aright and to its full 
extent. He is largely charged with forming his 
own character, both comprehensively as a man in 
the entireness of his being and also particularly 
in the specific pursuits and acts of his life. All 
right education must be conducted under the 
recognition of this principle of self-training and 
must ever seek to inculcate it on every learning- 
soul. 

But it is equally obvious that the capability of 
exercising this high prerogative is itself a matter 
of growth and training. Up to a certain stage, 
which however it is difficult, if not rather impos- 



THE TEACHING FACTOR g 

sible, to define in the life of any one, he is de- 
pendent for guidance, encouragement, discipline, 
on forces external to himself ; and he becomes 
virtually independent only by degrees and in the 
divers departments of his nature only by succes- 
sively maturing experiences. Perplexity must 
often attend the question whether he is capable 
at any stage of assuming this self-guidance for 
general culture or for any special training. If 
weakness and inefficiency wait on the error on 
one side of too prolonged dependence, a possibly 
more harmful presumption and audacity may 
characterize the error on the other side of assum- 
ing prematurely self-control and independence. 

Two principles of fundamental significance are 
applicable here. First, to every rational nature 
there necessarily appertains an ideal of the best 
and highest attainable in character and condi- 
tion. The simple notion of responsibility as 
attaching to every such nature involves this 
truth. But this ideal is itself a matter of growth 
— of guidance and of culture. To unfold and 
perfect it is indeed a governing object in all true 
science of education. Nature of itself germi- 
nates this ideal and provides guards and helps 
for its development. Experience helps to 
school and foster it. Example and counsel 
with self-study and reflection add their perfect- 
ing work. The essential thing in this ideal of 
self-training is character — the best and highest 
attainable — not happiness or pleasure which ever 



lO THE FACTORS IN EDUCA T/OAT. 

waits on character and condition, not honor or 
applause that is equally but a consequent of 
character. The principle of the best and high- 
est applies both to the formation of the whole 
nature — of character in its most comprehensive 
import — and also to the acquisition of excellence 
of proper success in any specific pursuit or con- 
dition. 

Secondly, the main reliance in self-teaching is 
to be placed on one's self. The best and the 
highest is to be achieved by personal endeavor. 
It is not to be expected to come as a windfall 
by some chance or turn of fortune, nor as a gift 
to be bestowed by some friendly agency. So 
even the aspirant for the best and highest will, 
while freely accepting or even in emergencies 
soliciting help and counsel, avail himself of only 
so much as may be needful and use that as minis- 
tering, not mastering. 

Said a sagacious teacher to a lad asking help in 
solving an arithmetical problem that might easily 
be deemed to be beyond his years : " Listen : 
I tell you a story. Two men contracted to dig a 
well for which they were to receive a certain 
amount when they should find water. The labor 
was greater than they had calculated for, and 
they began to despond, and one proposed to give 
up. The other urged holding on, till at last the 
pick which one struck into the rock went through 
down into a pool of water which then rose upon 
them so fast that they had need to do their 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. II 

utmost to escape. So," she continued, "the light 
comes in when you try long and patiently." 
The lesson was accepted and was never forgotten. 
The whole life was shaped and blessed by that 
sage counsel confidingly obeyed. 

§ lo. Nature-Teaching.— Self-teaching com- 
bines all the three factors concerned in teaching 
— teacher, learner, and medium or instrument. 
The self-teacher has himself for teacher, learner, 
and matter of study. All other teaching forces 
are divisible into two kinds, impersonal and pcr- 
sonaly of which the former combines in the work 
of teaching two of the factors ; the latter, for the 
most part at least engages but one. All the 
impersonal teaching forces may be comprehen- 
sively included under the one denomination of 
nature-teach ing. 

A great part and a most indispensable part of 
the work wrought by education in the human 
soul is wrought by nature. Nature indeed leads 
in all this work of education ; guides in all ; co- 
operates in all ; crowns all. She dictates the 
end and so the ideal of the work to be effected, 
for this end and ideal are but the development 
and perfection of capabilities which she has 
created for the very purpose that they should be 
so developed and perfected. She incites in the 
instinct which she has implanted and enforces in 
the stern retributive laws with which she rules all 
things subject to her sway. She guides also as 
well as assists in all the prosecution of the train- 



1 2 THE FA C TORS IN ED UCA TION. 

ing-work which she prescribes. The work of 
education cannot be safely, wisely, or success- 
fully prosecuted except as this relation of nature 
is recognized from beginning to end. The grow- 
ing and learning spirit needs to be carefully 
trained from the earliest hour to observe and to 
obey what nature teaches and inculcates. Her 
teachings in themselves, rightly understood and 
rightly applied, never mislead. Her promptings, 
her instincts, her appetences, her ambitions, may 
be disproportionately followed, some unduly cul- 
tivated or heeded, others depressed or neglected ; 
she is nevertheless a wise, safe, altogether trust- 
worthy teacher, — a teacher, too, that never tires 
and never forsakes ; one, moreover, that will 
surely crown the attentive and docile with her 
laurels and equally punish with failure and 
shame the truant and the negligent. 

Nature teaches both as a model and also by 
direct inculcation of truth and wisdom ; reveal- 
ing everywhere principles and rules which are 
more or less exemplified and illustrated in her 
arrangements and her processes. The more 
closely she is studied, the more does she com- 
mend herself for imitation and the more wisely 
is she found to counsel. " Study nature as model 
and counsellor" is a prime maxim for the forma- 
tion of character. 

Nature teaches sympathetically as with mater- 
nal solicitude for her own offspring ; wisely, as 
knowing her offspring's needs ; safely, as never 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 13 

erring ; quickly and unobtrusively, her best 
teachings to a large extent to the unconscious 
ear ; and authoritatively, promising everything 
to the considerate learner and threatening all 
evil to the reckless and the defiant. 

Nature's lessons are many and diverse. She 
teaches what man is in himself, and in his rela- 
tions to the universe of being and of truth ; that 
he is himself an integral and responsible part of 
this universe, correlated with it in innumerable 
ways, bound to it in indissoluble bonds of sym- 
pathy and reciprocity of influence, subject to its 
laws and linked in with its destinies. She 
teaches him not only what he is in his original 
constitution, but also what he m'ay become and 
is created and commanded to be, and assures 
him that the happiness for which he longs but 
over which he has no direct control, yet waits 
on his compliance with the promptings and 
biddings of his true nature. She teaches him 
the ways and conditions of all healthy growth 
whether of body or of mind , that it must be 
continuous both as a whole and in all specific 
advances and attainments that under the iron 
rule of habit repetition of act ever strengthens 
tendency to good or to evil, the seed sown ever 
yielding its own harvest — a harvest of peace and 
content in age ever following the virtuous 
endeavors of growing life in thought, desire, and 
purpose, and a harvest of bitter regrets in like 
certainty following indulgence of evil feeling and 



1 4 THE FA C TORS IN ED UCA TION. 

evil conduct in youth ; — with emphatic voice 
declaring '' the child is father of the man." She 
teaches him the fundamental lessons of order 
and regularity to be observed in all the ongoings 
of life. She enforces the moral lessons of tem- 
perance and self-control and persevering indus- 
try ; of rectitude and sympathetic kindness ; of 
reverence and piety. Truly enviable is the child- 
hood and youth upon which rest in the fullest 
degree the sweet, broad and genial influences of 
nature where freest from the corruptions and 
narrownesses of artificial life. 

Education is thus an ordinance of nature. 
The ignorance and helplessness of infancy, she 
enjoins in ten thousand ways, must be educated 
into the vigor and efficiency of full manhood. 
What this education is she clearly unfolds in 
experience and to outward observation, affording 
herself as a model in her manifestations of her- 
self and in the revelations of truth and wisdom 
in her habitual ongoings. She is the prompter, 
the guide, the helper, the rewarder in all sound 
education. To every youthful aspirant for virtue 
and excellence, she says, '' Be a diligent student 
of my ways and of my instructions ; ever on time ; 
ever in place; ever aiming; ever growing; 
patiently waiting : confidently hoping ; the bud 
will at length quietly open into flower, and 
flower in its time bring in the perfected fruit." 

f II. Parental Teaching. — The home is 
preeminently the nursery of character. In- 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. I 5 

fancy is plastic and yields freely to the ear- 
liest impressions. Between the manifold paths 
open to its starting career it has no choice 
of its own and follows any leading. Its pas- 
sive nature forms itself into the mold that is 
first presented as its activities go out towards 
the particular object that first invites them. 
Whether endowment or culture is the mightier 
factor of character is for all practical inter- 
est an idle question. There can be no cul- 
ture where there is no endowment to be 
cultivated; and genius without culture is a 
germ that never yields blossom or fruit. Every 
child has a nature of its own ; it is human, con- 
stituted of body and soul, each having its own 
peculiar constitution and capability. Culture 
can only develop or stunt this characteristic 
capability ; cannot make it other than human, 
although it may be of the lowest grade — cannot 
dispossess it of brain, and nerve, and muscle, and 
bone, nor yet of feeling, intellect, and will, how- 
ever dwarfed ; while on the other hand as every 
such human capability is the subject of growth, 
each may by judicious and faithful culture be 
nourished up to health and vigor, to any inde- 
terminable degree within the limits of proper 
human nature. The defective and the mor- 
bid may indeed in the abundant provisions of 
nature for her creature, man, be in a measure 
healed or reinforced, and supplemented. The 
human spirit, destined to immortality with an 



1 6 THE FA CTORS IN ED UCA TION. 

undying capacity of growth, however feeble or 
even deficient at its birth, has yet before it the 
assurance that a character of enviable strength 
and beauty is possible to it as the distinctive 
gift and endowment of its creator. If the richest 
endowment solicits the richest culture, the 
meanest capacity has a hopeful career before it 
and only demands a sympathy, patience, judg- 
ment, and faithfulness adjusted to its special 
needs. 

Home culture is, in the general, parental. The 
parents, of divine right and prescription, rule the 
household. It is a double sovereignty, of equal 
rank and honor, of diverse power with their 
respective opportunity and fitness, but by the 
appointment of nature herself ever to be har- 
monious and reciprocally helpful. Discord in 
parental rule is ever perilous to filial peace and 
destiny. 

In the earliest stage, maternal rule and influ- 
ence undoubtedly must predominate, and so far 
it must be allowed to exert the most determining 
influence on character, as the first turn of the 
springing brook has most to do with the final 
course of the river. Truly has an old poet said : 

The mother, in her office, holds the key 

Of the soul ; and she it is who stamps the coin 

Of character, and makes the being, who would be a savage 

But for her gentle cares, a Christian man. 

Benjamin West is reported to have said : " My 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 1 7 

mother's kiss made me a painter." He referred 
to the fact that when at the age of seven, having 
been left in charge of the cradle of his sister, he 
sketched the sleeping form, his mother on her 
return observing the sketch was so pleased with 
the work that '' she took him in her arms and 
kissed him fondly." Such little influence, par- 
ticularly such kindly commxcndation, determines 
character in this plastic period of life. 

Parental training embraces both nurture and 
discipline. It supplies all needful food and nour- 
ishment to the growing capabilities of right and 
rich character so as to supply the defects and 
correct the deformities of nature, so far as may 
be, whether in body or mind, and so as also to 
nourish up to an ever advancing condition of 
health and vigor. It is its function also to 
awaken and engage aright all native activities in 
their season, directing them upon their proper 
objects, repressing all excesses as well as turning 
back from all wanderings, keeping them ever in 
the right way and in the right degree of exertion. 

§ 12. The leading particulars of parental duty 
in training are : — 

First, that it begin early. It can hardly begin 
too early ; for earliest impressions are deepest 
and the most dominant of tendency and of 
habit. If the opening life is greeted with the 
glad welcome which its nature solicits, in tem- 
perature, in nourishment, in bodily contact, in 
taste, and sound, an sight, from all that meet it 



1 8 THE FA CTORS IN ED UCA TION. 

of person or thing, it gets a setting out in its 
career that is most promising, for nature and 
nature's rule are beneficent and wise. On the 
other hand it maybe assumed with sad assurance 
that fretting touch, fretting food, fretting dress, 
fretting noise and fretting glare, and it may be 
added, fretting mother and fretting nurse, will 
breed a fretful temper. The sunny character is 
the child of morally sunny skies, as no plant of 
worth starts from out of cold and dark and un- 
genial soils. Education begins when first the 
young life is deposited in parental care and it is 
then that it does its best and its most efificient 
work on character. 

Secondly, parental training must be natural. 
It must be suited in kind and degree to native 
capabilities, and to native needs. It must not 
supplant nature. There is often excess of train- 
ing care, which is hurtful, misleading, stifling here 
and stuffing there, and so deforming and marring. 
Human life both in soul and body has a power 
of its own, a trend and set of its own, and 
a guiding instinct of its own. This is a fact 
that it is dangerous to overlook. How and how 
far natural propensities should be interfered 
with in training is a question that demands con- 
sideration and sound judgment. Each case must 
be determined on its own claims and merits. 
Training skill may mend nature, or even change 
it ; but it must itself be natural, of nature's de- 
vising and nature's applying. 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 1 9 

Thirdly, parental training must be kindly. 
This rule is indeed little more than an empha- 
sized particular embraced in the preceding. The 
training must be sympathetic ; suited to the 
needs and the occasions ; manifestly beneficial 
and loving ; as well as judicious and wise, for 
nature herself is wisdom and order and goodness 
in her inmost character. A gentle touch, a 
shaded countenance, a firmer accent, a slight 
withdrawal of wonted favor that only sufifices to 
manifest disapproval or restraint, is wiser and 
better and more efificient than boisterous threat 
or violent abuse, than rough word or angry 
blow. Infantile docility far exceeds the general 
estimate of parents. It was creditably reported 
to the American Philological Society at one of 
its annual meetings that the children in a family, 
the parents of whom were both deaf and dumb, 
were never known to cry. So quick to observe, 
to comprehend, to apply, is natural instinct. 
Particularly may it here be said that to threaten 
and not to execute the threat is a double curse ; 
it sanctions untruth and spoils temper. 

Fourthly, parental training should be continu- 
ous^ and ever congruous or consistent with itself. 
Even a certain uniformity in diet is requisite for 
health and growth of body, for all bodily func- 
tions by nature's organic law bend themselves to 
external conditions, and, moreover, are subject to 
the law of habit, to a degree indeed, it is be- 
lieved, that is but very inadequately recognized. 



20 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

Training in the broader sense, comprehending 
both nurture and discipline and for the whole 
race, fails if it does not count upon time, dura- 
tion, continuousness, as an indispensable condi- 
tion for the successful development of character 
both in the general and in all particular elements 
and features. Childhood is indeed characteristic- 
ally volatile. So nature has wisely ordered in 
order that the great diversity of capabilities may 
be symmetrically developed, so that no one shall 
become overgrown and no one dwarfed. Activ- 
ity must alternate with rest ; wakefulness with 
sleep; receptivity with out-putting power. Right 
training must recognize both of these opposite 
principles of continuousness and of change in 
food and exercise. Frequency of change pre- 
dominates in earlier life ; long continuousness is 
both more possible and also proportionately 
more effective in maturing life. Five minutes of 
uninterrupted strain of attention might be bad 
for the infant, while five hours might not overtax 
the adult. The commanding rule here is : time 
for every training process and singleness of occu- 
pation in that time,— the interval or duration 
to be allotted according to age, study, circum- 
stances generally. A great statesman, being 
asked how he could accomplish so much, replied : 
"By doing one thing at a time." This is a 
fundamental principle of successful life, applicable 
to every stage from infancy to maturity. While 
the principle of change has its claims, unwise, 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 21 

uncalled for change in nurture or in discipline, 
in teacher or in study, is the bane of all true edu- 
cation. 

Fifthly, parental training should be authorita- 
tive. The will of the parent should be and 
should ever, in all the intercourse between parent 
and child, even in the freest and most confiding 
intercourse, in the hour of sport and play as in 
the time of serious study or work, be held ready 
to manifest itself to be, paramount. A timely 
beginning followed up by consistent and rational 
rule, will make the duty easy. Not to break a 
child's will, but to direct and bend it, is the func- 
tion of wise parental rule. 

Once more, parental training should be aim- 
ing, purposive. It should have an aim both in 
respect to general character and also as to spe- 
cific features ; it should recognize this aim and 
steadily pursue it. So far as it lacks this, it 
lacks rationality itself. Utter negligence and 
indifference are hardly worse than an aimless, 
capricious, whimsical, fitful training, if training 
it can be called. 

§ 13. The method or way of parental training 
is either direct or indirect. It is direct in exam- 
ple, in precept and instruction, and all other 
kinds of personal influence. It is indirect in the 
selection of associates, of books, of teachers, of 
surroundings generally. 

The forming power of parental example ranks 
high among educational forces. The child has 



22 THE FACTORS IN EDUCA T/ON. 

an imitative nature, and molds itself instinct- 
ively into the form which the parental relation 
furnishes to it at its most impressible age, and 
presses upon it with greatest constancy and 
force. Temper, manners, opinions, life in all its 
outspringings, it fashions after the copy which, 
being ever before it, is watched and studied with 
incessant attention and keenest discernment ; 
and its plastic nature takes on the shape which 
the copy discloses to it. Heredity determines 
capability : parental example to a large extent 
directs and fills that capability. What the lov- 
ing and wise parent would wish his child to be, 
he must seem to the child to be, and the only 
way of rightly and successfully seeming is to 
be what he would seem. 

Parental training educates also by precept and 
instruction. Not all parents are educated them- 
selves, and this mode of training is in a great 
degree denied to them. Happy is the lot of 
those children whose mothers in their loving, 
patient way are capable of instructing in the ele- 
mentary branches of study. The kindergarten is 
good, but the nursery during the period of child- 
hood with equal teaching ability is better. The 
youth too may still subject himself often to 
home instruction in this or that department of 
study or of skill with profit to himself. Only 
when and where capacity fails is this home train- 
ing to be abandoned. 

Parental tralninsf once more is effective in the 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 23 

work of education in innumerable ways of per- 
sonal direct influence outside of example and 
proper precept. Particular acts may be sug- 
gested and encouraged or be repressed and hin- 
dered, particular tendencies be corrected or with- 
stood, particular habits broken up or confirmed. 
The parental heart should ever beat with affec- 
tionate solicitude, and the parental eye ever be 
open to discern opportunity, and parental love 
ever be quick to move as such opportunity shall 
arise. 

Parental training educates indirectly but effect- 
ively in ordering the environment, the surround- 
ings of the child. A well ordered family life, in 
genial homes, and cheerful scenery, tells might- 
ily on forming character. Regularity, cleanli- 
ness, temperance ; graceful manners, unselfish 
ministry, and sympathetic courtesy ; lofty aims 
and earnest endeavor ; well-nigh the whole 
catalogue of graces and virtues are inculcated, 
" line upon line, here a little and there a little " 
incessantly in the well ordered ongoings of 
family life. 

This indirect training is exerted in the parental 
determination of companionship. A man is 
formed as well as known by the company he 
keeps. The company of a refined and gentle 
mother can only with great danger be exchanged 
for that of an ignorant, coarse, rough, perhaps 
reckless hireling. Nurse, maid, governess, tutor, 
the best substitute possible perhaps in a particu- 



24 THE FACTORS IN EDUCA TION. 

lar case, should be selected with great care and 
with sound judgment ; and the influence on the 
character of the child well watched. The 
Roman rhetorician, prescribing how the future 
orator should be trained, required that the child 
should hear conversation only from the lips of 
the refined mother, lest a fixed habit of vulgar 
pronunciation should be formed. Not merely 
vulgarity of speech, but foulness of manners 
and morals, may be the consequence of early 
bad association. There is call here as every- 
where else in education for moderation and a 
wise discretion. A fond mother entrusted 
with the undivided charge of a promising child 
kept him away from all young companionship, 
till the boy became master of himself ; and he 
showed himself in mature life one of the 
roughest and rudest of men. Life's temptations 
must be encountered ; only so can strong virtues 
be grown. But the ordinance is imperative : 
shun the tempter : if to be met, take him at his 
worst and weakest, and seek to acquire power 
of resistance under the most favoring circum- 
stances at command. 

In an analogous way, parental training is in- 
directly effective in controlling the reading, the 
sports, the visits and travels, the entire outer 
life of the child. These particulars sufificienth' 
exemplify, the modes of parental influence in the 
work of education. All that can be done here 
is in this comprehensive way to note the ways. 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 25 

the opportunities, and consequently the obliga- 
tions and privileges of parents in this educating 
work to which they are called. 

§ 14. Technical Teaching. — Teaching may 
become an art, a profession, or vocation, general 
or special, and as such it requires certain qualifi- 
cations in order to highest efficiency and success. 
These qualifications are either more personal, 
attaching to the teacher as a man, or more 
technical, determined by the nature of his art 
or calling. 

First among the more personal qualifications 
for efficiency in the work of education is that of 
being syinpatJietic and coininiinicative. It is the 
teacher's function to impart nutriment to the 
growing spirit and to call forth and train its 
diverse activities. In order to this, he must be 
of a sympathetic nature, one who can put himself 
readily into communication with his pupil, 
engage his attention, enlist his confidence, his 
respect, his affection. It was a just remark of 
Xenophon of old that " he cannot teach who 
does not please." He must also be able to im- 
part to the receptive nature thus enlisted what 
he has to impart of mental food or mental train- 

Another requisite in the personal character of 
the teacher is earnestness. Education is a work 
demanding energy and seeks an end of highest 
importance. It is a work that will not prosper 
where there is indifference, listlessness, aimless- 



26 THE FA C TORS IN ED UCA TION. 

ness. The teacher must ever hold himself forth 
as a model ; and an earnest activity is an essen- 
tial in character. He can arouse the interest of 
his pupil only as he is aroused himself. " Pas- 
sion is contagious." If his teaching be without 
interest on his part it will go for nothing worth 
on his pupil's part. Not only needs he to 
manifest a genuine and deep interest in the pro- 
ficiency of his pupil, which is the special object 
he is expected to accomplish, but in order to 
this he needs to maintain ever a freshened inter- 
est in what he teaches. This indeed the teacher 
will often find to be a difficult thing, especially 
where only elementary branches of knowledge 
are to be taught. But this consideration should 
only inspire a more energetic effort of will that 
should be sustained by a sense of fidelity to his 
undertaking and of self-respect, and proper human 
interest for the highest good of his charge. In 
some way he may provide that the subject- 
matter of his lesson be studied afresh in some 
particular or other, some new truth be attained, 
some additional knowledge secured ; or the 
manner of teaching may be studied with a view 
to improvement in that art ; or the mental con- 
dition of his pupil be carefully considered. In 
some way, ever a specially awakened interest 
should be carried by the teacher into his class- 
room. It is indispensable to the right discharge 
of his trust that he show himself in all his work 
to be earnest. 



THE TEACHING FACTOR. 2/ 

Still another requisite in a successful teacher is 
technical skill ; he must understand his own art 
and be trained to practice it intelligently and 
dextrously. Teaching is an art in the highest 
and best sense of that word. No art or pursuit 
can be deemed to be more important to the 
world, than that of nourishing and shaping aright 
the forming character of the young. Its princi- 
ples, its ends or aims both in general and for 
special conditions and idiosyncrasies, its methods, 
may be known. The facility and dexterity 
which practice alone can give may be acquired. 
The teacher is required to know his art both in 
theory and in practice. Normal schools are 
properly felt to be necessities in the educational 
provisions of the state. 

The teacher must be an expert in his art gen- 
erally and must also be Vv^ell conversant with the 
particular department in which he is to teach. 
The specialist in instruction cannot carry his 
mastery over his own specialty in knowledge too 
far, but he needs in order to protect himself and 
his instructions from a narrow one-sidedness to 
keep himself ever abreast with the progress in 
other sciences and arts. He needs thus to un- 
derstand well his special science or art not 
only in its own intrinsic characteristics but also in 
all its relationships toother fields of truth and art. 

Once more, it is needful to his best success that 
the teacher be invested with a certain authorita- 
tivcness. For the special occasion of his teach- 



2 8 THE FA C TORS IN ED UCA TION. 

ing in the special study and the special pupilage, 
his authority as a teacher should be paramount to 
that of parents, of faculty, of text-book. Not 
that he should regard himself or be regarded as 
infallible in his opinion or his rule ; or that he 
should use his rightful authority immoderately 
or unwisely. But in so far as he is teacher, his 
very office requires that he teach as having 
authority. In this teaching sphere it is his to 
direct the time and place and method generally 
of study; the method of preparation and also 
the method of instruction, whether catechetically 
or by lecture ; whether orally or by written exer- 
cise ; by direct personal address to the individual 
or representatively and mediately through a desig- 
nated member of the class, or by concert of reply 
to his interrogations, or by becoming himself the 
mterrogated, — in fine as it respects all the details 
of instruction. From parent or guardian or 
pupil he may receive wish or suggestion, but not 
dictation. The responsibility is his ; his should 
be the corresponding independence of action. 
He must also in the matter of discipline be 
sovereign ruler to the full extent at least of his 
delegated authority. If he be associated with 
others he must appear before his special charge 
as clothed with the entire authority of the 
associated body of instruction in his particular 
field, and he should feel and act as thus being 
entrusted with their full right and power of rule. 
The authority in such association, moreover, must 



THE TEACHING E AC TOR. 29 

be held and exercised as a representative author- 
ity, not as absolute and undivided, but as dele- 
gated and so far limited. But the very nature of 
teaching, the essential character of the relation- 
ship between teacher and pupil, involves this 
prerogative of authority. The teacher must feel it 
to belong to him and to be in him in order that he 
may teach with the needful confidence ; the pupil 
must recognize this in order that he may be in the 
needful spirit of docility for best proficiency. 

§ 15. Of the more properly technical requi- 
sites for the most efficient work on the part of 
the teacher the first to be mentioned is that of 
congruotisness in relation to his special charge. 
Between jarring natures and jarring moods, the 
sympathetic work of teaching can hardly be ex- 
pected to prosper. Idiosyncrasies of character 
and peculiarities of condition in the case of the 
pupil demand consideration. The successive 
stages of his proficiency likewise require corre- 
sponding adaptations in the teacher. For the 
earlier and tenderer growths the more delicate 
touches of a woman's nature must be regarded as 
preferable, while for the tougher, stiffer qualities 
of a later age the firmer, sterner treatment of a 
man will generally be more effectual. Still far- 
ther the respective relationships of the pupil in 
innumerable directions will ever suggest adapta- 
tions both in the character, the training, and the 
condition generally of the teacher. 

In the next place are to be mentioned those 



30 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

requisites in the teacher which are determined 
by the conditions and instrumentaHties of his 
work. Place and time make their respective 
exactions, — a room and an hour given up singly 
and solely for his work, where and when no 
interruption can come or be expected to come, 
and the one thing — teaching and learning — is to 
engage exclusive attention. Then as to in- 
strumentalities concerned in his art, suitable 
objects for object lessons, maps, charts, and 
blackboards, text-books and books of reference, 
— the teacher must not only be able to command 
these for his needs but must also be trained him- 
self to make a ready and effective use of them. 

Still again the methods of his work, the partic- 
ular processes by which he effects his purpose, 
suggest certain corresponding requisites in the 
teacher. He must thus ever be able to present 
in his own personal condition and spirit a model 
of character generally and also of mental attain- 
ment and skill. He must also be able to meet 
whatever demands may be made of him in the 
diverse processes of teaching, whether in the way 
of catechetical instruction, drawing out what 
may be required of his pupil's knowledge and 
thought, both to show his fidelity in preparation 
and also fitly to call into active exercise his 
active powers of imagination and reflection ; or 
of exposition of obscure or difficult points in 
study ; or of formal lecture in more or less 
extended and methodical discourse. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE PUPIL. 

§ i6. The pupil or learner is the subject fac- 
tor in the work of education in whose active 
nature the interaction of all the factors engaged 
in the work takes place. This factor unites 
readily in itself, by virtue of its essential activity, 
that in which, that with which, and that for 
which the work is done — subject, medium, object. 
It is relatively more passive or receptive ; it is 
yet active in its very receptivity, receiving 
nourishment and training, not like clay or mar- 
ble, inert and lifeless, but sympathetic,, respon- 
sive, reacting in all impression. It is, moreover, 
itself the aggressive and dominant factor in all 
proper educational exercises and practice as distin- 
guished from simple instruction. It may yet in 
a loose and rather popular way be conveniently 
characterized as the subject in the work of educa- 
tion. 

As such it presents itself to the educator as a 
complement of capabilities which it is necessary 
for him distinctly to apprehend and scrutinize. 
They are comprehensively the general attributes 
of man considered as subject to growth towards 

31 



32 THE FACTORS IN EDUCA TIOJV. 

a certain kind of perfected character — this char- 
acter being determined by their innate capabiH- 
ties and to be interpreted out of them. Human 
nature, as capable of growth into an ideally per- 
fected manhood, is thus the essential subject of 
the educational work. The educator needs to 
know these capabilities in their particular nature 
and relationships. 

The pupil or learner — the subject with which 
the educator has to deal — has then certain 
nature-given capabilities. They may be stud- 
ied under two classes, those which are generic 
and essential in human nature as such ; and those 
which are specific, appertaining to individuals or 
to groups distinguished by diverse peculiari- 
ties. 

§ 17. I. The generic capabilities of the 
7tature entrusted to the charge of the educator. 
In regard to these it is to be observed at the 
outset that as they are innate, the educator 
must take them as they are. He cannot re-create, 
cannot implant new capabilities ; he can neither 
supplant nor superadd. He must take nature's 
creature as she gives it to him, asking no ques- 
tions for his work's sake, for that would be 
utterly futile, nor even for curiosity's sake, for 
that would be frivolous and idle. He must take 
nature as given. 

The essential endowments of human nature 
may be real, even although imperfect. There 



THE PUPIL. 33 

may be morbid tendencies, disfigurements, 
defects. These, however, may be, perhaps, 
often healed, or reshaped, or supplemented by 
patient care and skill. A wise beneficence has 
abundantly shown that the lowest in the scale in 
respect of proper human endowments, the feeblest 
in body and in mind, the most deficient in phys- 
ical organ and mental faculty, the dullest and 
least impressible, are often susceptible of being 
elevated and improved. "■ A man is a man for 
a' that," for all such defector distortion: and 
therefore capable of being educated. Leaving 
absolute monstrosity which is simply not-human^ 
the most lacking in capabilities, if yet human, 
should be regarded as worthy of education's ten- 
derest, wisest, most patient care. The weak may 
by a judicious hygiene be nurtured up to 
strength ; the deformed in body or mind may by 
skillful surgery be reduced to fairness and pro- 
portion ; the absolutely wanting organ be sup- 
plemented by co-organic helpfulness. It has 
ceased to be a miracle that the born deaf should 
be educated to talk and the born blind to read. 
Even the nerve cells under life's watchful bid- 
ding replace each other as the needs of life 
require ; and the morally weak may gain needed 
strength and help from intellect and feeling, as 
on the other hand the feeble-minded or the 
untrained in schools may attain high wisdom 
by the mere instincts of virtuous and resolute 
will. 



34 THE FACTORS IN EDUCA TION. 

This fundamental truth is accordingly to be 
accepted and acted on in all schemes of educa- 
tion. As /mnian, every child of humanity possesses 
all the essential endowments of man. He has a 
true bodily nature, however diseased or de- 
formed ; and this body of his is a subject of 
growth and culture which can be fed and trained 
up to a certain degree, at least, of ideal health 
and vigor. It is the part of education to pro- 
vide and make effectual this needful nutriment 
and discipline to the fullest extent. As human, 
also, every child of humanity has a mental or 
spiritual nature, comprehending every essential 
mental endowment. However weak, or how- 
ever disproportioned, he possesses sensibility, 
intellect, will — a true rational nature. Essen- 
tially active, this spiritual nature is ever at once 
aesthetic, intellectual, and moral ; and when 
viewed as the collective complement of these 
three functions in their harmonious and sym- 
metrical union and exercise, it is recognized as 
truly rational. It is the part of education to 
recognize each of these essential endowments 
as present in every being regarded as human. 
They are co-essential and complementary attri- 
butes. Without an aesthetic nature, that is, with- 
out a capability of communicating with other 
organic natures in the world around him— of 
reciprocating interaction with them — his own 
essential activity would be objectless and there- 
fore ever remain a mere zero, a barren potency. 



THE FUFIL. 35 

Without intelligence he could neither direct nor 
choose, nor achieve, and he must remain but an 
empty, fruitless endowment, a very nothing to 
himself and to the intelligences around him. 
Without will, without a power to direct his 
senses, his imaginings, his observations and his 
reflections, or even his executive faculties 
towards a purposed end, he is but a madly 
driven float on a havenless sea, feeling, knowing 
perhaps his sad condition and destiny, but only 
thereby more pitiable and despicable than the 
senseless log by his side. Indeed without a 
directive power, what could any aesthetic or 
intellectual endowment ever avail or profit ? 
An utterly undirected sense and imagination and 
intelligence could never in any proper import 
of the phrase be said to be either truly apprehen- 
sive of beauty or of even imperfect form, or 
productive of it — to be able to feel or to create 
real form ; or further to observe to any use of 
knowledge or to produce a proper thought or 
judgment — educe any truth — from any supposed 
observation or mental apprehension. These 
three functions, the function of form both recep- 
tive as in aesthetic sense, and also productive, as 
in proper art ; the function of truth, or the 
apprehensive and the proper thinking intelli- 
gence ; and the function of will, the self-direc- 
tive of aesthetic and intellectual activities as well 
as of subordinate executive determinations, are 
essential and necessary each to the other and 



36 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

all to the entire rational nature. Every human 
being has and must have each and all in larger 
or smaller degree and have them all in some 
degree larger or smaller, of co-relationship in 
reciprocating organic ministry. 

Every true educator must accordingly meet 
his charge, however to appearance or by repre- 
sentation unpromising, with the assured convic- 
tion in his own mind that as human his pupil is 
capable of being nourished and trained up to an 
indeterminable degree of perfection in manhood 
both as to expansion and to symmetry of form, 
for the rational nature of man which never>dies is 
ever growing while it lives. Moreover each ra- 
tional capability has its corresponding object with 
which it naturally communicates, reciprocally 
and responsively acting and being acted upon. 
It follows that fields of study which are naturally 
fitted to their respective mental capabilities are, 
one and all, open and accessible more or less to 
every subject of education. There is no reason 
as there is no ground of truth in the excuse for 
setting aside a particular study that the student 
has no capacity for it. If there be deficiency in 
any particular case, the fact is only good and 
urgent reason for the awakening and developing 
the faculty in defect by special training in the 
very field that the deficient capacity demands. 
More commonly the fact of deficiency is attribu- 
table to culpable negligence in the previous 
training which has crowded out the fitting object 



THE PUPIL. 37 

for evoking and exercising the particular capa- 
bility by other studies more attractive or conven- 
ient to teacher or pupil. The records of educa- 
tion abundantly show that the veriest dullard in 
this or that branch of knowledge or skill at an 
earlier age has been brought out and up to emi- 
nence in that very pursuit. For a single in- 
stance : one who in his college career was styled 
the mathematician of his State from his seeming 
incompetency to comprehend the most simple 
rudimentary mathematical truth, became by his 
own persistent determination in after years a 
distinguished professor of mathematics in a 
prominent college of the country. 

In his pupil, then, the educator is to find a 
nature of manifold capabilities, all so far as essen- 
tial in a truly human being, subject to an indefi- 
nite degree of growth, of expansion and vigor, 
and all, the least and feeblest as well as the best 
endowed, to be nurtured and trained by his 
patient skill, up to a full symmetrical man- 
hood, even according to the ideal of life and 
character prefigured in his creation. More than 
this indeed : he is to find in every human life an 
instinct urging it on, as well as guiding it, to a 
full realization of the design and end of its being 
as intended by its maker. This instinct is 
indeed often blunted and cramped and as often 
perverted or misdirected ; but it is an innate 
characteristic and undying as the soul itself. 
The ingenuity of the teacher will be tasked to 



3 8 THE FA CTORS IN ED UCA TION. 

devise means of awakening it when dormant or 
of strengthening it when in any degree active. 
His labor will for the most part be well recom- 
pensed. ^' A free curiosity," said that profound 
philosopher as well as experienced teacher, St. 
Augustine, '* has more force in our learning than 
an enforcement through threats." And what is 
true in regard to the culture of the intelligence is 
true also in regard to the improvement of the 
whole nature. Instinct is stronger than law. It 
is a mighty helper in the work of teaching. 

§i8. These manifold capabilities, moreover, 
are to be educated not only in their intrinsic na- 
tures and attributes, but also in their manifold 
relationships. Man is an organic part of an envi- 
roning universe, with which his life and destiny 
are in vital, inseparable connection. So close 
and vital is this connection that ethical science 
places social duty side by side coordinately with 
personal duty, and unites condition with charac- 
ter as constituting the comprehensive object or 
end in human duty ; — character is involved with 
condition. It is a half truth that man is the crea- 
ture of circumstances ; he reacts on circumstances 
and determines them ; they are alike subject to 
the principle of organic reciprocation. Educa- 
tion must train to the fullest freedom and sympa- 
thy in wide degree and manner between man and 
his surroundings. His endowment interacts in 
closest sympathy and interdependence with his 
environment. This is a principle, a law of broad 



THE PUPIL. 39 

significance and of imperative necessity that the 
growth of the human spirit involves the vital 
union of endowment with environment — of char- 
acter with condition. Not only is it needful that 
it never be forgotten or overlooked ; it is also 
of high importance that it be intelligently turned 
to account in all educational processes. 

Man is thus the creature of time. His being 
and life are in time ; begin on time, and flow on 
with time, subject ever to time, yet disposer of 
time. Time's fixed and orderly succession, that 
will not be reversed or checked in its flight and 
cannot be repaired in its loss, and gives us only 
instants for our use and profit, is to be made by 
the earliest and most assiduous care and training 
the familiar, habitual principle in all life and con- 
duct. Punctuality, diligence, rest, are imperative 
conditions of successful growth and life. Effi- 
ciency, enjoyment, success, depend on an habit- 
ual, as it were instinctive conformableness to time. 

A like conformableness is to be cultivated by 
care so to be thus habitual and instinctive to all 
the conditions and relationships of space, in 
orderly disposition of all conduct and of all out- 
ward things at one's disposal — a place for every- 
thing and everything in its place. 

So too the contents of time and space, all real- 
ities that interact in any way with the nature 
and life of man, need to be recognized and 
brought into sympathy and reciprocation of 
helpful ministry. 



40 THE FA C TORS IN ED UCA TION. 

The nature given to the educator is thus to 
be trained not only in its proper intrinsic proper- 
ties but also in its relations to all environing 
agencies, so that on the one hand stumblings 
and collisions and consequent failures shall be 
avoided, and on the other hand sympathetic helps 
and ministries from without shall be secured. 
An habitual consonance with all these surround- 
ing and conditioning forces is to be the fruit of a 
faithful training. 

§ 19. II. The specially modified capabil- 
ities to be recog7iized m the work of education. 

I. First there are to be recognized the capabil- 
ities specially modified in respect of age. In ear- 
liest infancy we have the stage characterized by 
dependence for supply of food and of object 
on which to act. Life's whole character, for 
strength and worth, discounting, of course, all 
heredity as already placed to the account of 
nature, seems to be staked on the treatment 
given it here at the start. This has already been 
suggested, § 12. It is added simply in illustra- 
tion, that we may well suppose that if the infant 
ear is first among the senses to be arrested and 
to be entertained with soft harmonious sounds, 
prolonged as the sense may be able to bear it 
and repeated as often as may be allowed, there 
may be effected the budding of a musical genius 
that if still nurtured and trained in advancing age 
may become a master spirit in musical art. Or 



THE PUPIL. 41 

if we suppose a light of softened brilliancy and 
pleasing tint shall first engage the sense of such 
a budding nature, and this influence be continued 
predominant over other influences, a decided 
tendency to exalt color and form over all other 
objects of interest and study will be evolved that 
will determine the taste and calling and distinc- 
tion of the man. The analogy will hold valid 
for all of the distinguishable capabilities of man's 
diversified nature and for all stages of his pupil- 
age. Aptitudes are in this way generated that 
shall lead and govern all maturer life. The 
twig so easily bent becomes the tree inclined, — 
stiff set upward or downward, to sunshine or to 
shade, beautiful or ugly, vigorous and fruitful or 
sickly and barren. 

The helpless dependency of infancy passes into 
the budding self-consciousness of childhood, with 
newly modified capabilities, and then into boy- 
hood with a show of independence, but flexible 
and yielding to superiors, and then into youth 
with its vigorous assertion of independence in 
limited fields of activity till proper manhood is 
reached which, as mature, asserts its exclusive 
right to choose its own helps and guides, its own 
mental aliment and arena of exertion. To each of 
these stages, hardly distinguishable in their lines of 
demarcation, the capabilities of the pupil nature 
become so far specially modified and require 
corresponding treatment in all judicious and 
effective education. 



42 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

Next are to be recognized the modifications of 
native capabilities in respect to sex. The na- 
tures generally of the two sexes being the same, 
the office of education must so far be the same. 
Health and vigor, both physical and mental, are 
to be secured alike for each. The comparatively 
very limited differences require, however, their 
due consideration. Nature has ordained for them 
diverse occupations and offices and imposes a 
corresponding method of educational treatment. 
This diversity of method, small at first, widens to 
the close of the educational age. A stouter 
frame and firmer muscle with corresponding 
mental endowment in the one case, and in the 
other a more delicate sense and a nicer tact indi- 
cate the diversity of character and life designed 
by nature. Effeminacy in man and stalwartness 
in woman are alike vicious. In home training 
as in schools the slight diversity of treatment is 
for the most part safely left to instinctive prompt- 
ings on the part of parent and teacher. Outdoor 
life in the one case will be set over against more 
domestic occupations and recreations in the 
other, while yet the general path of instruction 
will remain the same. Nothing in human physi- 
ology or in human biography forbids that the 
entire field of general education should be open 
to both. All science and all art invite the pur- 
suit of both alike, at least in the general, with 
only specific modifications. In particular 
branches one may possess a slightly superior apt- 



THE PUPIL. 43 

ness, with yet a balancing of all the respective 
capabilities taken in the aggregate. Home duty 
is the proper allotment of one, imposing lighter 
burdens and tenderer offices; the storm and 
tempest of public care are obviously assigned to 
the other. Accordingly a softer tone, a milder 
rule, a kindlier spirit and more winning manners 
should characterize the educational work in 
the one case ; a sterner, firmer, more exacting 
treatment in the other. 

As to the coeducation of the sexes in more 
public institutions, reason and observation con- 
cur in teaching that while the pupil remains 
under the watchful guardianship of family and 
home, it may be encouraged as advantageous in 
manifold ways. Economy and convenience gen- 
erally dictate this, and liberality of thought and 
feeling and general sociability to be cultivated 
in the pupil, also require it. When mature age is 
reached, the pupil becomes his own master and 
the decision as to his companionship in studies is 
properly left with him. But there is a middle 
stage of life, the period when feeling and fancy 
are exuberant and are accompanied by the burst- 
ing forth of the new sense of freedom and inde- 
pendence, when accordingly impulse is wild and 
reason and thoughtfulness have not attained 
their ascendency, the three years of eighteen to 
twenty-one with the bordering years before and 
after that age, in which period coeducation is 
hardly to be commended. At this stage of life 



44 THE FA C TORS IN ED C/CA 77 ON. 

it is to be considered too that the wider separa- 
tion in the education of the different sexes finds 
place. Lighter gymnastics are in preference in 
the one case, rougher athletics in the other. In 
mental training too, before ante-professional 
studies are taken up,> the curriculum must vary 
so considerably that the regularity of routine 
necessary in large institutions can with difificulty 
be maintained. The recent contrivance so called 
of '* annex " arrangements seems to meet best all 
exigencies, guarding against dangers and furnish- 
ing the richest and best appliances for the higher 
education. 

Still further are to be recognized the modifica- 
tions of capabilities appearing in "pro^oiY personal 
idiosyncrasies. These are abnormal propensities 
or aptitudes in some particular bodily or mental 
activity craving or accepting with excessive eager- 
ness certain pursuits or on the other hand with 
undue aversion repelling them. The tendencies 
in such cases are to unsymmetrical and accord- 
ingly imperfect development. Far from being 
nature's calls either to forcing processes which 
shall give still additional opportunity and aid to 
activities already in excess, or to checking and 
repressing treatment, they summon rather to a 
specially careful nursing of the other activities — 
those which are relatively in defect. Genius 
demands a correspondingly rich support in the 
entire nature and life. It will care for itself ; 
provide its own alitiment ; open up its own 



THE PUPIL. 45 

ways ; descry its own best opportunities. It is 
the general nature that it demands for its own 
sake to be specially cared for, so that when pre- 
eminent ability in any line of life shall be called 
out in its maturity for its best and highest exer- 
tions, there shall be no dead weight to carry, but, 
contrariwise, ready support and ministration 
from the whole being symmetrically developed 
and trained. 

Once more there are to be recognized the 
modifications of what may be denominated the 
extrinsic capabilities, resulting from peculiarities 
of condition, in parentage, in neighborhood, in 
climate, in command of influence or patronage 
or means and instrumentalities. Human life is a 
dependency. In itself it is utterly impotent but 
as it has that fj-om without on which it may feed, 
and lean, and act ; and in opposition to its wisest 
and best exertions there arise obstacles and 
resistances which are often too mighty for its 
weakness — neither to be guarded against nor to 
be overcome. Nature is all-motherly and man 
is her favorite ; but she herself is subject to man- 
ifold limitations, and is compelled at times to 
withhold succor where most urgently craved. 
The rice-fed cannot compete with the wheat- 
nourished brain, yet climate distributes peoples 
and assigns them their food. The diversities of 
condition bearing on the development of human 
life and character are too vast and too numerous 
to admit of estimation or of enumeration. How 



46 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

to supply what may be wanting in the condition 
of his pupil, and to remove or help to overcome 
what may be adverse in it, and how to make 
available all the attainable helps from the sur- 
roundings, is the problem ever pressing on the 
mind of the true and faithful educator. For 
the most part these diversified conditions must 
furnish their own suggestions as to the way of 
meeting them. Books are inadequate to supply 
them. Experience can but partially avail. Each 
new case must bring its own interpreter and 
counselor. 



CHAPTER III. 

MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 

§ 20. Besides the two main factors in educa- 
tion — the relatively more active teacher and the 
more receptive pupil — there intervenes, as a kind 
of intermediate, a third kind of agency in the 
work of education, which may be generally 
designated as that of '' means and appliances." 
The teacher must necessarily engage his pupil 
with some object on which his developing active 
nature shall exert itself ; such an object is prop- 
erly tJic means by which he attains his end in 
educating. But there are besides such means 
still other factors, more indirectly concerned in 
his work yet more or less necessary, which 
demand his careful consideration ; they may be 
classed under the comprehensive term appli- 
ances. 

Educational Means. — While the personal force 
of the teacher must be recognized as the 
most important and most potential factor in 
education, acting in the several ways of stim- 
ulating, exemplifying, instructing, and guiding 
beyond any other teaching force, still for its own 
efficiency it finds other agencies necessary or 

47 



48 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

convenient. Of these some are indispensable 
in order to any interaction between teacher and 
pupil, for one mind can reach another only 
through the bodily sense ; others are needful 
aids to the pupil's apprehension and use; 
others still are in different ways more or less 
convenient and helpful. 

Of these necessary or convenient intermediate 
agencies are those numberless real and sensible 
objects which may be used either for direct 
study or illustration or stimulation. All educa- 
tion in the last analysis consists in engag- 
ing in due degree the learning activity with the 
object proper for its exercise. Object teaching, 
teaching through objects, is thus comprehensive. 
This object may be presented as an actual 
reality or representatively. Real '' object les- 
sons " are given in all nature teaching. In 
countless numbers they throng the path of 
human experience and growth, unsought for, 
unknown indeed at the first, of themselves awak- 
ening the sense and making their impression on 
the swelling and shaping character. It is the 
proper function of the teacher whether nurse, 
governess, parent, or professor, so far as may be 
to select these objects and to temper their action 
on the sense. 

The immediate presentation to the sense is of 
course as a general truth to be preferred to any 
representation or mere description or analogical 
suggestion. Thus in Natural History the teacher 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 49 

introduces some particular mineral, or flower, or 
insect, or as in chemical and mechanical science 
some force in actual operation. But often this 
is impracticable ; and recourse is had to repre- 
sentative agency ; as diagrams and numerical 
figures and symbols in mathematics ; maps and 
pictures in the physical sciences ; and in the 
arts, the respective products of the arts, as 
paintings and statuary in the plastic arts, read- 
ings and recitations in literature and oratory; 
and, last of all, and more than all, proper text- 
books. 

The advantages of proper object-teaching are 
manifold. Real objects presented directly to the 
senses engage and fix the attention. They fasci- 
nate and please. They reveal directly and thus 
fully and completely, not dimly and partially as 
in abstract representation or description. They 
economize time and labor ; — one si"fht, one 
sound, one presentation to the sense, will do 
more towards awakening and rightly impressing 
the apprehensive nature tba?n long and repeated 
exposition, oral or written. The house, the 
play-room, the school-room, the class-room 
should be richly furnished with these instru- 
mentalities. 

§ 21. Under the comprehensive designation 
of Appliances may be gathered all the manifold 
factors that come in to facilitate or hinder the 
work of education which are yet more distant 
and indirect in their relation to the work than 
4 



50 THE FA CTORS IN ED UCA TION. 

proper means or instrumentalities. First among 
these are those of Place and Time. The govern- 
ing principle to be regarded in all the regulations 
of place and time in education is that which pre- 
scribes that there be a fixed place and a fixed 
time which shall be exclusively devoted to the 
work. The teacher should have nothing else to 
think of but to teach at the time of teaching ; he 
should put his whole soul into his work that he 
may be at his best as at once sympathetic stimu- 
lant, model, and instructor. The pupil still more 
needs, in order to best proficiency, to be and to 
feel himself to be, exempt from all interruption 
and all distraction, both during the time of study 
and the time of receiving instruction. Mental 
concentration, the power at will to engage the 
whole capacity of the mind in study or work of 
whatever kind, is a leading aim and a chief 
result of true and effective education. It is just 
the lack of this power which marks the condition 
of a tyro or novice, and he needs before almost 
all other things the help which comes from the 
feeling that when called to study or to be 
instructed he has nothing else to think of. 
Home studies here suffer a great disadvantage ; 
since if he is not subjected to actual interrup- 
tions, there must always be the feeling on the 
part of the student that such interruptions are 
possible or probable, and his mind is conse- 
quently on the stretch to observe every move- 
ment and to conjecture what it may be or what 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 5 I 

it may signify. Home can hardly be made to be 
to him the place for the one only possible thing 
to be done — that of study. A similar considera- 
tion is to be made of the relation of a fixed time 
for study and instruction to proficiency in early 
education when the habits of application are first 
shaped and determined. '* Any time is no time," 
is a maxim of most emphatic import in train- 
ing. The hour fixed should be invariably and 
punctually observed — not a succeeding hour, not 
a quarter hour or five minutes, no, not in free 
allowance a single minute, late. 

The necessary changes in time and place 
should accordingly be made in clear reason and 
with careful regularity. They should be as few 
as may be consistent with the demands for rest 
and recreation. " A rolling stone gathers no 
moss," in learning as in other occupations. 
Change of time and place, involving change of 
teacher, change of circumstances, change of 
study, of text-books, of mode of instruction, is 
most baneful in education. It is to the growing 
mind what frequent transplanting or frequent 
nipping of bud is to a young plant ; one may 
effectually stop growth by simply nipping bud 
after bud, enforcing a new germination in some 
other part, to be nipped in its turn. A lean 
soil and a weak training are preferable to 
frequent uprooting and clipping. Continuous- 
ness is a prime attribute in all effective cul- 
ture. To the dull and the backward needless 



52 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

change in teacher, in place, in process is espe- 
cially harmful; the quick and the apt may pos- 
sibly be able to turn the untoward to account. 

The number of studies to be simultaneously 
pursued with a given charge will be a matter of 
careful consideration to the educator. The 
natural volatility of childhood indicates the 
necessity of short exercises. Five, ten, fifteen 
minutes are enough for one continued exercise in 
the kindergarten. By skillful conversion of 
needful rest into recreation or substitution of 
fresh powers and organs for those which have 
been sufificiently in practice for the time, a half 
dozen studies or even more may be profitably 
assigned to the young learner. As mental 
strength increases, the number may be gradually 
reduced. Only the well-advanced and strong 
can wisely devote his whole time to a single 
study or even to but two. 

In determining the number of studies that 
may be profitably pursued simultaneously it is 
obvious that the number and the selection should 
be such as to prevent confusion between different 
studies as is likely to be the case in the study of 
different foreign languages at the same time ; 
also such as not to hinder the ready connection 
of one lesson with those which have preceded ; 
such, moreover, as to secure the benefits of men- 
tal rest and.recreation, and allow the fresh exer- 
tion of mental activity in each allotment of 
study; and, once more, such as follow in the due 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 53 

order of dependence of one study upon another 
either in the mental attainments and condition 
of the pupil or in the character of the studies 
themselves in matter or method. 

Both in the selection of time and of place, 
regard should be had to the demands of health, 
and of comfort, as well as of freedom from in- 
terruption. Well warmed and well ventilated 
rooms neatly and comfortably furnished, as also 
the hours of greater mental freshness and vigor, 
or those of the morning rather than those of the 
decline of day, should be secured. 

§ 22. In this field of outer agency intervening 
in the interaction between teacher and learner 
is embraced still farther the influence of class- 
association. The advantages of such class-associ- 
ation in education are many and obvious. It is 
economical on the side of the teaching force, 
which can to a large degree impart instruction as 
well to a number as to an individual. It pro- 
motes in the learner content and satisfaction 
with his condition and work, as he finds others 
sharing with him in all its troubles and hardships 
and so in sympathy with him. He learns much 
from his associates which cannot be so effectually 
imparted by one farther removed from him by 
age, by mental vigor and possessions, by more 
advanced methods of holding and presenting 
truth. The spirit of emulation is stirred and he is 
stimulated by a desire of excelling or of avoiding 
discredit or disgrace, by a proper esprit de corps. 



54 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION: 

Still farther the social nature is cultivated, a 
most important part of a thorough education. 
The cases in which private individual training is 
preferable are accordingly exceptional, and the 
reasons for resorting to it should be clear and 
urgent. Still, on the other hand, there is a wise 
limitation in regard to the numbers to be gath- 
ered into a class. The number should not be so 
great as to prevent an immediate personal com- 
munication between the teacher and each mem- 
ber of the class, for it is a cardinal principle that 
the personal factor is the mightiest of educa- 
tional forces. 

§ 23. In this field of outer but related educa- 
tional agency, moreover, is to be placed the stim- 
ulating influence that comes from marks, honors, 
prizes, rewards of divers kinds. Marking progress 
or neglect involving consequences of indirect 
commendation or of direct censure, keeps alive 
a sense of responsibility which, besides its imme- 
diate effect of inducing faithfulness, is of itself 
an important aim in the best education. This 
method of stimulating may give way as the pupil 
attains to independence and self-mastery. The 
objections often urged against this method of 
stimulation that the duty should be done for its 
own sake and that jealousy, animosity, pride, are 
its frequent fruits, may well enforce careful con- 
sideration as to the details of the method and as 
to the extent to which it shall be carried. But 
the principle is abundantly enforced in the order- 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 55 

ing of human life and conduct by its ordainer and 
author and commends itself to the approval of 
enlightened human reason. 

If rewards, so for analogous reasons, punish- 
ments may properly enter into the system of 
educational agencies. They are requisite for the 
maintenance of the needful authority of the 
teacher. They awaken through fear the pupil's 
respect for this authority. They are directly cor- 
rective while they serve to sustain a proper sense 
of responsibility for manners and conduct, and. so 
are efficient preparations for mature life in 
society and under government. 

The modes of punishment are manifold, invit- 
ing to a judicious selection and adaptation to the 
special case and condition. They vary in kind 
and in degree, from censure and rebuke by sim- 
ple word or frown, to degradation in rank or 
place, isolation, infliction of bodily pain ; by 
marks of a culprit condition, withholding priv- 
ileges, suspension or actual removal attended 
with more or less of disgrace in manner or in 
publicity. Sovereignty, as before indicated, 
belongs to the teaching force immediately and 
absolutely or representatively and mediately, and 
the involved right to punish as well as reward in 
reasonable support of authority belongs there 
with equal right. 

The allotment and administration of punish- 
ment must be in calm and firm conviction of right 
and duty, in tenderness, with manifest solicitude 



$6 THE FA CTORS IN EDUCA TION. 

for the welfare of the offender as well as for the 
maintenance of the needful order in the institu- 
tion — in judgment tempered with mercy and 
with readiness to forgive. The modes must be 
adapted to age, sex, heinousness of offense, influ- 
ence upon others, fitness to recover the offender. 
Happy is that condition in which the simplest 
expression of disapproval on the part of the 
teacher shall so touch the offender's sense of 
wrong, his spirit of honor, of grateful respect for 
his superior, that contrition, confession, redress, 
shall quickly bring in response free forgiveness, 
order being maintained and offender saved. 

§ 24. Still more remote but active in its rela- 
tion to teaching are the sources of support to 
educational means and agencies with the involved 
general superintendence and management. Pro- 
visions for this support are greatly diversified so 
that exact classification is impracticable. The 
leading classes, however, may be thus enu- 
merated : I. Household instruction; 2. Select 
schools; 3. Privately endowed Institutions rank- 
ing from academy up to university, and including 
the College, the Institute, and the Seminary ; 4. 
State Institutions, from the Common School up 
to the University. 

The founder or founders of course determine 
the general character and rank of the institution ; 
whether more or less religious or purely secular ; 
whether for both sexes or for but one ; whether 
for special classes in the community or open to 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 57 

all ; whether inclusive of board and lodging 
rooms or for '' day-scholars " or for both without 
distinction ; whether for higher or lower educa- 
tion ; whether liberal and classical or for special 
professions or pursuits. 

§ 25. Privately endowed institutions procure 
from the State the privileges of legally corporate 
bodies by which they are enabled to receive and 
manage and convey any kind of property, real or 
personal, within designated limits and to trans- 
mit the trust they thus receive and to perpetuate 
their existence, with more or less of other priv- 
ileges and immunities. One of the most impor- 
tant of these privileges is that of filling any va- 
cancy occurring in the board of management. 
Such are called '^ close corporations." To them 
as such there does not seem to be any reasonable 
objection. The State will see to it that no ex- 
cessive power or privilege be extended to them at 
the start and will reserve to itself the sovereign 
right to correct abuses. 

In prevention of two more considerable evils in 
the creation of such endowed institutions to be 
managed by boards of trust having educational 
faculties subject to their general supervision, wise 
legislation should provide: i, that the board of 
trust be such in number of members as to prevent 
any crippling of the institution by divided coun- 
sels and aims ; and 2, that the foundations be 
not so narrow in their provisions as to occasion 
an inability to observe the terms of the founda- 



58 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

tion in the changes in life and society that a 
long perpetuated institution may encounter. It 
is a monstrous wrong and evil to violate the clear 
prescriptions of a monied trust. To allow it is to 
defeat the very object of a trust, and so to pre- 
vent endowments. On the other hand changes 
too great and too many to be foreseen or calcu- 
lated for beforehand are well-nigh certain to oc- 
cur in the progress of society. There may not 
improbably be such changes that the exact com- 
pliance with a greatly detailed instrument creat- 
ing a trust may more seriously defeat the intent 
of the founder than a clear violation of its pre- 
scriptions. 

§ 26. State educational institutions are a 
marked distinction of modern civilization. The 
origin and progress of these institutions in number 
and magnitude, and in degree and mode of sup- 
port have naturally called forth animated investi- 
gation and discussion. A new conception of the 
origin, nature, and function of the State and of 
its relations to the citizen has slowly but steadily 
grown up in recent history, entering here and 
there jn specific ways so as entirely to transform 
civil laws and the administration of government 
under them. The theory of the nation now 
spreading and giving signs of predominating 
throughout civil society is that the government 
and all official administration is for the peopk — 
civil rule for the ruled, not for the ruler; that 
the nation has a true corporate life of which the 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 59 

citizens or people are veritable organic parts ; 
that accordingly the national life as the organic 
complement of all the individual human lives 
within its bounds, absorbing all, must live and 
act in all and for all ; and moreover that it has a 
character and a destiny ; so that its one compre- 
hensive function is to perfect the character and 
condition of all its people, in a just regard to the 
character and condition of sister nations. But 
this is nothing else but a true education which 
seeks nothing beyond or beside the perfection of 
character and condition in the pupil life entrusted 
to its charge. This is a grand, noble, altogether 
rational view of national life. It clearly and in- 
disputably makes the education of its citizens the 
grand duty and most sacred function of civil gov- 
ernment. 

A vicious misinterpretation of this theory is 
most carefully to be shunned — that it involves 
the concentration of all educational support 
into its own control and direction, dispensing 
with the agency of the individual or the partic- 
ular communities embraced within the nation. 
All life is single, while yet organic ; and each 
organic part has its own special function in the 
promotion of the common life. In human 
society, although organized so as to constitute a 
veritable organic unity, each organic part must, 
in order to the highest welfare of the whole 
and so of itself, fulfill its own duty; and that 
general life is the richer and healthier in which 



6o THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

the parts do most in their respective limits of 
function. 

The just inference from this is that while the 
Nation or the State leaves to the individual and 
the local community, all that they will undertake 
or accomplish, it should yet in generous provi- 
dent care see to it that all its citizens receive the 
education which shall best effect the perfection 
of the character and condition of all. This is at 
least the ideal result or aim which the nation 
should endeavor faithfully to realize. The prin- 
ciple is not violated if, as in the United States, 
the general care of educational interests should 
be allotted to the constituent States. 

This high function of the Nation or of the State 
in securing the perfecting in the highest degree 
of the character and condition of all its citizens 
involves the duty to provide the requisite means 
of education, — rooms, furniture, appliances, 
means, and living teacher, — and also the right 
to compel the citizen to a faithful use of those 
means. The right and the duty both on the 
part of the State and on the part of the citizen 
are reciprocal — the duty to provide and the right 
to compel on the part of the State ; and on the 
part of the citizen the right to demand and the 
duty to use aright the provisions made thus for 
his individual good and so for the good of the 
nation. 

The subordinate questions as to the methods 
of State interference in education — the extent of 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES, 6 1 

its provisions, the limits as to the stage of pro- 
ficiency which it shall seek, — resolve themselves 
with comparatively little difficulty in the light of 
this theory of the true relationship of the State to 
its citizens as that of a true organic life which is 
set to seek its own perfection in character and 
condition and which it can seek only and must 
ever seek in the perfection of the character and 
condition of its individual citizens. 

The methods of State interference will conform 
to the established method of State functional 
administration. 

The extent of the provisions to be made by 
the State for the education of its citizens will be 
determined by the financial resources of the State 
and its opportunities for action. It may be said 
generally that the provisions should be adequate 
to the needs, at least, up to the limitations of 
State ability. 

In respect to the stage of educational profi- 
ciency to which the State should carry its citizens, 
the general principle is that the State should aim 
at securing for all its people the highest, largest, 
best education reasonably possible. It will be 
found on examination of any particular limiting 
stage, as for instance, that of mere rudimentary 
instruction,— as in reading, writing, arithmetic, — 
or of widier instruction in the general facts and 
truths of place and time, — geography, history, — or 
wider still, bringing in the rudiments of astron- 
omy, and the other physical sciences, or adding 



62 THE FACTORS IN EDUCA TIOiV. 

elementary instruction in the mental sciences of 
psychology, logic, aesthetics, and ethics, or, still 
more, initiating into the dexterities of technical 
art or trade or profession, that the question will 
turn on the resources and available opportunities 
of acting on the part of the State or civil com- 
munity or on the abilities, the conveniences, or 
the inclinations of the people, and not at all 
upon the proprieties of State intervention as being 
supposably confined to some lower stage. The 
best education possible for all the people, so far as 
they can or will avail themselves of it, is the one 
governing principle. The best and highest edu- 
cation of the individual citizen is the best for the 
State. 

With this view observations from particular 
points of investigation will be found to be in 
general harmony. The more intelligence and 
culture in the nation, the better every way it is 
for the welfare of the people in strength and in 
happiness, — in general well-being. The principle 
applies to men of every calling ; the higher cult- 
ure and training the more useful and the better 
every way are both the men engaged in the par- 
ticular calling and also through them the com- 
munity and the nation. The skilled mechanic 
earns the larger wages ; his skill makes him an 
abler man to accomplish valuable results. Intel- 
ligence and culture are foes to vice and indolence. 
If grave offenses be sometimes found with them, 
the fact astounds us by its strangeness. Such 



MEANS AND APPLIANCES. 63 

offending is seldom fascinating, seldom conta- 
gious. It is in the dens of ignorance where gross 
vice flourishes and it is this grade of vice which 
most corrupts, debases, and impoverishes. There 
cannot be too much intelligence in the national 
life, if the culture of the aesthetic and moral 
natures be maintained at a correspondingly ele- 
vated grade, so that the whole character be 
rationally rounded out and symmetrical. 

The pecuniary expenditure for this high end 
to the best ability of the nation is a wise invest- 
ment. It will in all probability be reimbursed in 
full and more by the direct educational contribu- 
tions from the munificence which the highest and 
best culture excites and fosters. It cannot work 
unjustly for the poor who by reason of their ina- 
bility to bear the heavier part of the cost of edu- 
cation consisting in the expenditure of time and 
of money for the support of the pupil outside of 
the public provision, are consequently disabled 
from availing themselves of it ; for the cost comes 
mainly from the taxation of the rich. The poor 
are not necessarily excluded altogether from the 
higher culture. Energy and merit will find a 
way for themselves. The high intelligence of 
rich neighbors is a blessing to the poor. Such 
intelligence may be sought in right endeavor, but 
cannot rightly be made the object of envy and 
hate. General intelligence, moreover, is the best 
leveler in society, a foe at once to pride and to 
envy and a minister to content and to self- 



64 THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 

respect. Provision for the highest culture 
offei'ed to every one even the lowest in worldly 
condition, although it be but here and there 
accepted, is the best safeguard against social 
arrogance and superciliousness, and the surest 
preventive of permanent class distinctions. The 
multiplication of pursuits, ever, increasing as 
intelligent civilization advances, each winning its 
own honors through its superior skill in its own 
field, more and more hinders invidious compari- 
son and consequent discontent. Nor can it be 
deemed unwise or in any respect impolitic to 
allure, by generous provisions for the highest 
and best culture, into the pursuits of science and 
art or of professional life, the children of afflu- 
ence and luxury and so redeem them from the 
tendencies to worthless or even profligate lives 
which naturally grow up where there is exemp- 
tion from the necessities of toil and self-denial. 
So there may be those who will gratefully say 
with George Herbert — 

Whereas my birth and spirit rather took 

The way that takes the town, 
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book 

And wrap me in a gown. 

Free investments on the part of the State in 
the interest of the highest and best and largest 
education are thus not only legitimate but abun- 
dantly reimbursive and most conducive to the 
best interests of a people. 



BOOK II. 

EDUCATIONAL WORK -THE INTER- 
ACTION OF THE EDUCATIONAL 
FACTORS. 



CHAPTER L 

THE TWOFOLD WORK OF EDUCATION. 

§ 27. All growth involves a twofold proc- 
ess : a receptive and a reactive process. The 
receptive process, in the growth which education 
seeks, is denominated Nurture. The compre- 
hensive reactive process may be termed Train- 
ing. Both of these terms are derived from the 
analogies of physical life and are to be taken 
rather as suggestive than as exactly significant of 
what they are used to denote. They indicate 
rather than define. 

These two processes are inseparable in all 
growth. They are, however, readily distin- 
guished in their proper nature and result. Nur- 
ture supplies food and so enlarges a capable 
nature ; training uses this food and so strengthens 
5 65 



66 EDUCATIONAL WORK, 

and forms the growing nature. Nurture is 
rather the conditioning process; training the 
consummating process. 

§ 28. In its work of nurture, education wisely 
directs in the selection, the apprehension, and 
the assimilation of the aliment to be supplied. 
It prescribes that this supplied aliment be ivJiole- 
some, such as will promote growth ; that it be 
suited to the special condition of the pupil in 
respect to age, sex, environment, stage of profi- 
ciency ; that it serve to carry on previous alimen- 
tation and prepare for what is to follow ; that it 
be in due quantity as of right quality, neither 
scanty nor excessive ; that time be given for its 
reception, — in other words and imagery, that the 
mind of the pupil be engaged sufficiently long to 
receive a full and definite impression of the object 
with which it is in interaction. A quick sensi- 
tiveness to objects and events judiciously selected 
from the thronging mass around, a sympathetic 
interest in them, and a readiness to be impressed 
by them is a needed foundation for large and 
rapid growth. 

In apprehending, judicious education aims to 
secure that the aliment thus selected and sup- 
plied be taken with a genuine relish, which edu- 
cating skill should be competent to awaken. 
Mind and body alike naturally hunger for appro- 
priate food. To like food is to whet digestion. 
The hunger for the aliment required for the time 
may be aroused by divers means which a discreet 



THE TWOFOLD WORK OF EDUCA T/OJV. 6/ 

teacher will devise ; and, if needful, recourse 
may be had even to imposed abstinence or to 
short allowance. It prescribes, moreover, that 
this lively apprehension be true and accurate, 
full and complete ; and also be clear and vivid. 
Such a habit of apprehending, so easily formed in 
the early growth of mind, is of inestimable value 
for the future life. 

Full nutrition is not effected until the aliment 
thus judiciously selected and taken with a zest 
and truly and thoroughly apprehended, is also 
properly assimilated. This process in nutrition 
is inexplicable alike in bodily and in mental life. 
It is an instinctive movement that under the 
laws of living and growing things takes place of 
itself when the suitable food is once received in 
healthy growth. Time only is demanded ; and 
these demands of time vary indefinitely with age, 
proficiency, condition. To gorge and to cram 
are faults to be diligently guarded against as 
hostile to wholesome digestion ; to a true and 
healthful assimilation of beauty and truth and 
goodness as of animal nutriment. So far as may 
be and for a general plan of procedure, educa- 
tion prescribes that whatever nutriment be ap- 
prehended, — whatever form of beauty is contem- 
plated, whatever truth considered, or whatever 
purpose intended — it should be allowed and even 
carefully caused to pass into the very life of the 
soul and so be incorporated in right organic rela- 
tionship into the body of its activity and feeling. 



6S EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

Much quiet and patient rumination, or reiterated 
repetition of the impression made upon the soul 
by objects of beauty, truth, or goodness, is a 
necessary condition of mental growth. 

The receptive process in growth, made up of 
the sympathetic acceptance, the full and accurate 
apprehension, and the thorough assimilation of 
the object of study, is only preparatory. 
Food is for strength, and strength is for ac- 
tion. 

§ 29. It is the proper function of the training 
process to develop still further and specially to 
guide the activity thus enlarged and strength- 
ened. The first step in this comprehensive proc- 
ess is simply responsive to the impression made 
by the impressing object. This, at least, is the 
first step as the logically conditioning step in the 
complex process. It is not to be supposed that 
any appreciable time always and necessarily inter- 
venes. On the other hand for the most part the 
movement from first impression to following 
apprehension and assimilation, and then to the 
reactive part comprehending all its progressive 
forms of response and positive reaction, may be 
as instantaneous as impression and action in the 
mind following and going on to perfect itself, 
can be supposed to be. But the movement may 
possibly cease with any one of the parts named. 
Impressions that leave no appreciable result are 
common with us almost as the minutes of our 
waking lives. Habits of listless impression are 



THE TWOFOLD WORK OF EDUCATION. 69 

the bane of mental life, easily acquired, most 
difficult to be eradicated or resisted. So the full 
assimilating reception of truth may be followed 
only by the mere impress left on the mind's 
active being. Its activity is simply shaped or 
turned ; except, perhaps, as it is quickened or re- 
pressed. The mind is in such case but as a mass 
of plastic clay ; it is indented, so far shaped, per- 
haps lightened or weighted more ; that is all. 
It simply gravitates in this new shape or form, 
with no spring of action started. The mind sim- 
ply takes upon itself what is given it, responsive 
only as yielding and taking new form. The rich 
experience of life which is the appointed soil for 
growing character, becomes thus utterly value- 
less for all mental quickening, as undigested food 
only clogs bodily vigor. Still this impression 
wrought into and upon the mind, has given a 
form to its active nature, which the eye of con- 
sciousness, when it is opened, may observe and 
recognize as the resulting state from such im- 
pression. It abides ; the mind properly retains it. 
This is the mental attribute of retentiveness — of 
memory in its simplest rudimentary condition. 
It necessarily involves no intelligence, except as 
the consciousness of the state is regarded as a 
proper act of the Intelligence, nor does it imply 
any purpose — any act of the will, except per- 
haps, as simply permissive and not at all interfer- 
ing to guide, or to further or hinder. This is the 
primal element in all mental life, — that which 



70 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

conditions all subsequent self-study, self-develop- 
ment ; and on which all education rests so far as 
prompted by the state of the mind itself. As 
the bodily life starts from food first received, so 
the mind starts all its development from this 
primitive condition determined to it by impres- 
sion from without or in its interaction with 
exterior realities. There is a form now presented 
to it while before all was formless and empty to 
all observation by itself or others. Henceforth 
it can never be without such form to invite 
observation and reaction upon it ; for even if the 
primitive impression be apparently subverted, 
this can be done only by the intervention of 
some new form, and never absolutely and 
fully. The mind thus ever retains. Retentive- 
ness, which is simple memory as passive and not 
reproductive, is a fundamental attribute of men- 
tal life, and signifies the mere form of the mind 
— the condition and shape of the mental activity 
as formed by some previous impression or act. 
Of the prominence of the form given thus to the 
mind in simple impression a most instructive 
exemplification is to be found in the common 
experience of what is called *' being turned about." 
No reasoning with one's self is suf^cient often to 
correct this error of impression which for the 
most part is unconsciously received. It is just 
because a permanent form is thus determined to 
the mind by mere impression that the training of 
the mind for or under the power of impression 



THE TWOFOLD WORK OF EDUCATION. yi 

received so imperiously demands the attention 
of the educator. 

The nourishing and strengthening of any form 
of mental activity thus produced is the effective 
condition of stability and firmness to the partic- 
ular trait or to the whole character, as it is the 
starting point or germ of all following growth. 
Something now exists to be sprouted and nour- 
ished and trained. There is a goal to start from 
and a post to fasten to ; a basis and support for 
all future motion and progress. Education effects 
its first work with this as its fundamental ele- 
ment — a form of mental activity received and 
retained. 

The process of reproduction is the natural 
sequent of this retention in growing life. The 
impression received may be transient as the im- 
pressing force for the most part quickly with- 
draws. But the process thus begun may be 
taken up and carried on by the mind itself. 
There is now a positive activity exerted ; and 
this state of mind is known as the imagination. 
It is the more active side, as the memory is the 
more passive side of the mind regarded simply in 
respect to its form, or that attribute through 
which it may be recognized by itself in con- 
sciousness or by other minds in mediate revela- 
tion as in look or word or bodily act. Such is 
the simple story of the mind's growth thus far; 
its sensibility or its capacity of receiving impres- 
sion — of taking food — becomes actual recipient 



72 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

and retainer in simple memory, and then repro- 
duces this received form — this mental image or 
phantasm, as it has been denominated, when ap- 
plied to some specific impression. This repro- 
ductive process, which regarded on the passive 
side is known as memory and on the active side 
as imagination, is now food and stimulus to the 
more complex and diversified forms of the imag- 
ination, as it varies the simply reproduced form 
by adding to it or dropping from it more or less 
or by combining it with other mental forms or 
by absolutely new production. We have thus 
the distinguishable stages of imaginative move- 
ment ; — the simply reproductive ; the partially 
reproductive ; the productive with combination ; 
and the positively creative imagination. 

The second step in training, thus, is the reten- 
tion and reproduction of the food that has been 
received and assimilated. It will be observed 
that the activity of the mind as of the body may 
be in all this more or less entirely instinctive, — the 
properly directive power being more or less en- 
tirely in abeyance ; — the will simply permitting, 
but neither impelling nor guiding. It may 
accordingly all take place without being brought 
out into the distinct notice of consciousness. 
Body and mind grow, often effect their best 
growth, when not thus consciously scanned. 
Still it should never be forgotten that the whole 
mind is ever present in every possible experience. 
The learner is never separated from himself, nor 



THE TIVOJ^OLD WORK OF EDUCATION. 73 

is any organic part of his nature separated from 
another. In his most purely instinctive and 
most wholly unconscious acts his whole self is 
present — body and spirit — and in more or less 
sympathetic co-operation. He cannot remember, 
retain an impression without intelligence, with- 
out self-direction. The whole intelligent and 
purposive soul is present in every feeling and in 
every act of memory and imagination ; its intelli- 
gence and will are, in a true sense, active, for 
their very essence is activity. The whole field of 
this action is also before the eye of conscious- 
ness in the same sense in which a natural or ex- 
ternal field is all before the eye of an observer, 
whether or not this or that particular object in 
the field is distinctly noticed ; whether or not in- 
deed the field itself is actually discerned. An 
object thus may be truly said to be within the 
range of consciousness, although the conscious 
activity does not actually and distinctively exert 
itself upon it. 

§ 30. The next step in culture, whether of 
body or of mind, after the conditioning food has 
been taken and digested in the case of the body, 
and in the case of the mind in an analogous way 
inwrought into its activity in the forms of the 
memory and the Imagination, introduces into 
one or other of the ten thousand forms of active 
life. The awakening and exertion of the mem- 
ory and the imagination have indeed already 
entered upon this stage. We have indeed here 



74 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

but an exemplification of what is occurring in all 
life-processes, one stage passing into another in 
imperceptible degrees, as bud into flower. The 
indication of the work of education in training, as 
applied to the more distinguishable departments 
of human life and activity, will be given hereafter 
in the several places prescribed by our method. 
Here it can only be said that the training should 
be directed to the selection of the kind of activity 
proper at the time and in the circumstances to 
be called forth, and to the prompting and main- 
tenance of this activity. Strength comes only 
by exercise. In a low and limited sense there 
may be power in simple knowing, as there is in 
simple food. But the condition of effective 
strength, of physical force and agility, and also of 
mental vigor and skill, as appointed by our very 
nature, is exercise. 

But exercise to be effective in education must 
be something more than mere wild beating of 
the air, without aim or significance ; something 
more than fussy pottering. It must be at least 
rational ; and consequently must be penetrated 
and moved by somewhat of sympathetic interest, 
intelligence, and purposive aim. Mere swinging 
of the arms and idle twirling of the fingers will 
not sufifice to form the skilled pugilist or the 
dexterous juggler ; nor will idle pencilings, or 
listless figurings, or empty musings make the 
eminent draughtsman, or mathematician, or 
thinker, or poet. Effective exercise here must be 



THE TWOFOLD WORK OF EDUCATION. 75 

intelligent and aiming as well as with interest. 
It must be concentrated on some particular ca- 
pability, and not loose and scattering. It must 
^ be continued for more or less of time — there 
) must be repetition. It is this continued action 
or repetition which makes habit ; and it is under 
the natural law of habit that action comes to be 
more or less spontaneous and instinctive, putting 
itself forward of itself whenever and wherever 
opportunity offers, thus facilitating exertion. 
The efficient man, the successful man in all fields 
of achievement is the man of habit — the man 
who has trained his powers to be instincts, as it 
were, self-prompting and self-guiding, and ready 
to act as need may require, without care or labor 
or even particular bidding on his part. 

This part of educational work in training may 
be well exemplified in its applications to the 
several stages, already indicated, of the develop- 
ment of the imagination. First, the impression 
received and assimilated, gives a certain shaping 
to the mind — a certain form which more or less 
abides. As now a part of the mind's own activ- 
ity, it is technically termed a mental image, a 
phantasm, or, in looser phrase perhaps, a mental 
form, an idea. Now a fundamental principle in 
effective training prescribes that this phantasm 
or idea, this act of the imagination, be continued 
till it becomes fixed, incorporated into the mind's 
body of activity so as to be capable of self-main- 
tenance and also of ministry to the mental life 



^6 EDUCATIONAL WORK, 

generally as may be needful. This is the first 
step in training after the impression is received, 
to make the idea received in its fullest sense the 
mind's own. This is an indispensable step ; 
stumbling, disgust, failure, are inevitable conse- 
quents of neglect or omission here. It requires 
time, more or less in different cases. The expert 
teacher is apt to overrate his pupil's capacity in 
the beginnings of a study or practice, and conse- 
quently hastens on to advanced steps for which 
there is not the requisite preparation. The 
maxim, accordingly, is peremptory : make sure 
and permanent beyond all doubt or mistake the be- 
ginnings of study and practice. By continuance of 
the initial idea or movement, fix it in abiding 
self-maintenance and capability of spontaneous 
exertion and ministry, so that it be ready to meet 
any call for its action and help. In other words, 
give the learner complete mastery of this idea or 
movement, so that it shall be as it were an instinct 
of his nature. 

At the next stage the exercise in training be- 
comes the pupil's own origination of idea or 
movement. Passive, receptive, simply holding 
what had been given him before, he now gives 
forth, produces. The law of exercise here is 
simply : let this productive activity be continued, 
repeated, kept up, till the capacity of producing 
is established as a permanent and effective pos- 
session of the mind. 

The law of continuance or repetition is the 



THE TWOFOLD IVOK A' OF EDUCATION. yy 

same essentially for the succeeding stages in 
which the original phantasm or idea has lost 
somewhat of its simple and pure conformity to 
the original impression, and under the intelligent 
control of the will has combined with itself other 
ideas or other movements ; or still farther has been 
succeeded by actual new creative activity. The 
law of nature in training is throughout : continue, 
repeat, till the activity is established and carried 
so far as may be towards its true perfected con- 
dition ; till it become in a true sense automatic, 
self-prompting as occasion may invite or allow. 

This presentation of the law of exercise in edu- 
cation runs counter, it is to be acknowledged, to 
a certain mode of teaching and practice some- 
what in vogue. It is recommended thus that 
the pupil instead of being trained along the line 
of the simplest and most elementary ideas in- 
volved in a given study, should be introduced at 
once to the gross whole of the subject matter of 
the study and in an analogous way in artistic 
training should be put on copying or construct- 
ing in large masses or concrete wholes. Thus 
in learning to read, the teaching recommended, 
avoiding training in the elements singly, leads at 
once to the imitation or reproduction of sen- 
tences, phrases, words in concrete forms and so 
beginning with the whole and ending with the 
parts or elements. Thus, it is argued, the child 
learns language — learns to understand speech and 
to speak himself ; he does not first hear elemen- 



yS EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

tary sounds, then single words, then sentences, 
then continued discourse. Such, it is maintained, 
is nature's law in educating. But this view is 
altogether too hasty and partial. Never since 
child has come to speak, to put forth thought 
into language, has it been known that its first 
effort was a perfect, fully articulated word, expres- 
sing a definite idea: much less that it first ut- 
tered a full thought in fitting speech. Just the 
contrary of all this. Its earliest effort at com- 
municating, beyond at least a responsive smile 
or scowl, has ever been a simple effort of breath, 
— a feeble puff or expiration, repeated over and 
over, how many times no most watchful nurse 
has ever been able to count ; then after long 
interval spent in this initial practice there has 
followed a feeble vocalization — a cooino; or a 
mooing, repeated countless times ; then the sim- 
plest, most rudimentary articulation continued 
often long before it comes to proper word-forms 
and still longer before it can put forth speech- 
forms or full communications of thought. Na- 
ture's practice in training is thus from the 
elementary to the concrete. So in practice, as 
for example in chirography : — penmanship is 
quickest and best acquired by beginning exer^ 
cises, continued up to a decided proficiency in 
each, on the elementary strokes, straight lined 
and curved, sloped, perpendicular or circular, till 
each is mastered. 

The significance and importance of frequent 



THE TWOFOLD WORK OF EDUCATION. 79 

stated reviews of previous lessons are seen in this 
light of the bearing of exercise on mental devel- 
opment. Not only does this practice of review- 
ing nourish up in the mind of the learner a feeling 
that every acquisition is in some more or less 
definite way to be made serviceable in the future 
of study and therefore should be diligently and 
thoroughly effected, but the repetition of a pre- 
vious activity involved in the review is an 
important condition of mental progress. Expe- 
rience has shown that the labor spent in review 
effects for mental growth and discipline two or 
three times as much as that on the advance 
lessons. Hence the usefulness of the prevalent 
method of beginning each successive lesson with a 
review of the preceding lessons whether in study 
or practice^ and of regular reviews at the end of 
each week, or month, or term, or year, or course. 
This is in accordance with the law of all growth 
that it must be continued and continuous, each 
new acquisition bound to the old by actual 
living union — a work of time and reiteration. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK IN 
EDUCATION. 

§ 32. Effective work in education involves 
divers conditions, some of which are intrinsic, 
being essential constituents or characteristics, 
and others are extrinsic, being determined by 
the relationships of the work to its surroundings. 
The principles here are, first, that the work of 
education be true to itself, ever bearing its own 
essential characters or elements along with it ; 
secondly, that all true work among men is in 
organic dependence on outer realities and their 
respective state or condition. The more com- 
manding and comprehensive of these conditions, 
which in another form and from another point of 
view have in part already been presented but 
which will bear repetition, are as follows : — 

(i.) Effective work in education must he sf7/i- 
pathetic. Teacher and pupil must be in sym- 
pathy with each other and each with the study 
or medium in which the work takes place. The 
lowest degree or stage of possible sympathy is 
that of mere communicability which exists by 
the very necessities of nature between all rational 
80 



CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK. 8 1 

beings. Positive aversion presupposes this 
degree at least of sympathy, since no aversion 
can exist where there is no possibility of inter- 
action. But from this lowest stage sympathy 
may rise to high degrees of reciprocating affec- 
tion and interest. The higher and warmer and 
freer this sympathy becomes, the more effective 
will be the work of nurturing and training. The 
teacher is thus bidden to bring to his work a 
living personal interest in his pupil, in his well- 
being generally, but especially in his proficiency 
in the immediate study or course of training at 
the time. This he can do by reason of their 
common nature as human beings, however dull 
or repulsive his charge may be. The sympa- 
thetic interest with which a teacher approaches 
a lovable, sympathetic, bright and eager mind or 
class of minds may differ widely from that in 
which he drives himself to the loathsome, stupid, 
and indifferent or even the sulky and mulish 
pupil. But a true beneficent sympathy may be 
and ought to be in lively exercise even in the 
latter case. There must also be as a condition 
of effective work in teaching a true sympathetic 
interest in the particular study or exercise in 
hand. In mere rudimentary instruction involv- 
ing the unceasing repetition of the same elemen- 
tary lessons, there is a great liability to fall into 
a cold unsympathetic condition which is hostile 
to any worthy result in teaching. It is conse- 
quently a peremptory duty on the part of the 
6 



82 EDUCATIONAL WORK, 

teacher that he diligently train himself to bring 
to his charge a mind evidently and impressively 
awake and interested. Such a freshness of inter- 
est may always be awakened in some of the 
several obvious ways, as elsewhere already indi- 
cated, § 14 ; and the teacher is inexcusable who 
fails to awaken it in himself. He must be in 
sympathy too with the work itself of teaching ; 
he must appreciate its dignity and its worth ; he 
must find satisfaction, as he may indeed find 
satisfaction of the highest degree, in the prosecu- 
tion and result of the work. 

In order to this sympathetic relation between 
teacher and pupil the instruction must of course 
be preferably and almost exclusively oral. Voice 
is the special organ of sympathetic emotion, and 
word the natural medium of communication 
between soul and soul. But oral instruction 
involves the entire personal presence and so ever 
enlists as its auxiliary the whole power of the 
living teacher as model and as inspiration. The 
written word, the proper lecture, must ever be 
regarded as but a representative and substitute, 
and so as characteristically the inferior and 
weaker. In the earlier stages of training, the 
lecture is entirely out of place, except perhaps in 
extreme necessity. To the professional student 
it may be to some extent and in some cases the 
preferable way, as where the needful text-book 
is not within reach ; or where the instruction is 
but incidental or auxiliary, as where light may be 



CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK. 83 

shed from the history or the Hterature of the 
subject-matter of instruction, where guides and 
helps need to be indicated, methods of study dis- 
cussed, topics for investigation presented, and 
the Hke. The lecture addresses itself to the 
learning mind predominantly as receptive ; it is 
only through consequence or suggestion that its 
proper activity is engaged. It is accordingly 
better suited to the mind already well furnished 
and trained. The discussion of particular ques- 
tions of fact or truth, taken up for one cause or 
another out of the orderly scheme of a science — 
questions that may call for special investigation 
or have special applications not easily finding 
place in the general scheme — may call for the 
special lecture. In proper object-teaching, more- 
over, there is occasion and indeed a special de- 
mand for the viva voce lecture, as in the descrip- 
tive lessons of Natural History and the experi- 
mental instruction of Physical Science, as also in 
studies directed upon diagrams, or maps, or art- 
products addressed to the eye or ear. The 
proper written lecture, whether read or pro- 
nounced from memory, had its origin and its vin- 
dication in the necessities of a bookless age. In 
this present age of books, and particularly in this 
day of a well-nigh superabundant educational lit- 
erature, the special call for written lectures in edu- 
cation has ceased. The text-book is everywhere 
at hand, for all departments of instruction, for all 
stages and conditions of mental training. Its 



84 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

recommendations are manifold and decisive. It 
addresses directly the active, while, as already 
stated, the lecture engages chiefly the receptive 
nature, and during the whole period of mental de- 
velopment up to the time of proper maturity in 
vigor and discipline, it is the active nature which is 
the dominant, and the receptive is the subsidiary. 
The text-book furnishes the conditions for the 
best employment of all that large part of educa- 
tional time when the pupil is not in immediate 
communication with the teacher. It is thus a 
thing of high economical value, scarcely to be 
overrated. It calls forth the direct, independent 
effort of the pupil to interpret out its teaching; 
to connect the study of to-day with the preced- 
ing study and so at once serves to strengthen the 
memory as well as to lead to the discovery of 
the scientific relationships in the successive parts 
of the teaching ; and to enable him to understand 
precisely what stage of the developing science he 
has reached and in a general way what remains 
for his attainment. The text-book invites a pre- 
cision of statement of fact and principle, in defi- 
nition and in proof, and a clear, excTct method of 
development which the written lecture can sel- 
dom attain without detriment to the rhetorical 
characteristics of proper rational discourse. 
The lecture is indeed a favorite mode of instruc- 
tion with the ambitious writer and speaker, seek- 
ing oratorical effect in novel dogma or original 
exposition and method ; and under the power of 



CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK. 85 

this temptation it is made to serve for the enter- 
tainment, the stimulation, or the admiration of 
the student, rather than for his discipline in self- 
sustained study or for his thorough mastery of 
science. In fine, it would seem from reason, and 
the opinion is corroborated in actual experience, 
that the text-book is the indispensable ally and 
helper with inconsiderable exceptions in all gen- 
eral education, from the rudimentary to the 
proper professional stage, whether the instruction 
be oral or by proper lecture. It is a great econo- 
mizer of time and care and labor ; it necessitates 
mental activity ; and induces accuracy, thorough- 
ness, system, in acquisition. As such an efficient 
instrument in all education it needs to be pre- 
pared with highest skill, accurate and thorough 
and in exactest logical method ; more to be val- 
ued indeed as a type-form and mold for the 
developing thought of the learner than for the 
quality or quantity of the knowledge which it 
imparts. 

The text-book gives full opportunity for oral 
instruction, and so for all sympathetic communi- 
cation between teacher and pupil. The regu- 
larly recurring examination on that portion of 
the text-book assigned for the particular lesson 
in the recitation room, the questioning and 
answering on the part of the teacher and pupil, 
gives just the occasion and the prompting requi- 
site for this free intercommunication. Special 
care will be necessary that this dialectic freedom 



86 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

be not hampered or prevented by excessive num- 
bers in class instruction. 

A reciprocating sympathy, it should be remem- 
bered, is as necessary on the part of the pupil as 
of the teacher. It is his duty, as under nurture 
and training, to carry into his work a lively 
interest and affection ; to put himself by deter- 
mined effort in freest communication with his 
teacher ; to love, as is possible for him always, 
to be taught and trained. He must overcome 
aversion, and indifference, and be positively in 
active sympathy with his task. The teacher 
himself by his own manifested sympathy and 
interest may do much to awaken this interest in 
his pupil; for feeling is contagious. 

§ 33- (2-) A second intrinsic condition of ef- 
fective work in education is that it be earliest. 
Dull, prosy, dragging work is as ineffective and 
so wasteful and vicious in teaching or in learning 
as everywhere else. It is doubly harmful here 
indeed because of the contagiousness of feeling 
already referred to between teacher and pupil. 
The earnest teacher makes the earaest learner. 

§ 34- (3-) A third condition of effective work 
in education is that it be aiming. The teacher 
must have distinctly in his own mind, both the 
comprehensive result of his teaching work, which 
of course must be in organic interdependence 
and subordination to the full result of the entire 
educational work for his pupil and likewise the 
best result of his entire life, and also have dis- 



CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK. 8/ 

tinctly in view the result of the particular study 
or exercise in hand in its special bearing and rela- 
tionship to those more comprehensive results. 
Education is a rational procedure ; and aiming is 
a first function of reason. Hence thorough edu- 
cation involves the necessity of determining the 
result in the several stages of progress, so as to 
discover how far the governing aim has been 
reached, how it has been most promoted, how it 
has been hindered ; how it has furthered or im- 
peded other departments of training. The pro- 
ficiency of the pupil needs to be the perpetual 
study of the faithful and efficient teacher. More- 
over, by showing to his pupil that he has before 
him ever an aim in his work towards which he is 
making his way, he best inculcates by his own 
effective example this high quality of character 
in his pupil. 

§ 35. (4.) A fourth condition of effectivework 
in education is that it ever be developing. Its 
essential function is to effect a growth ; and 
every lesson, every study, every exercise should 
carry on a proper growth, an advance, an enlarge- 
ment, an increase of thought. In order to the 
best and highest efficiency here, it should first 
make sure the attainment already made ; and 
make a continuous advance from it, connecting 
the new with the old in a proper vital union. 
Observation shows a positive waste of a very 
large proportion of educational time and labor, 
simply by the failure to connect successive at- 



SS EDUCATIONAL IVORA^. 

tainments in knowledge or skill. Every exercise 
should look back to what has preceded and 
forward to what is to come. It is not enough 
simply to acquire, to attain. Accumulation is 
not accretion and true growth. To cram is 
indeed often to hinder progress. One of the 
most important habits to be formed in early 
training is that of connecting each attainment 
with what has preceded and with what is to 
follow. A perpetual mental growth may thus be 
secured under the law of habit, making the con- 
necting work spontaneous or instinctive, while 
fragmentary, disconnected study or practice, 
fails to improve and commonly enfeebles. The 
present is pre-eminently a reading age ; but of 
the multitude of busy readers, few can be found 
who must not in candor confess that the years of 
incessant but discontinuous reading have brought 
them virtually little or nothing of mental riches 
or strength, and the chief legacy they leave is an 
incurable or invincible incapacity to promote real 
growth. Education should see to it that all 
mental training have the nature and character of 
a true continuous growth. It should indeed go 
farther than this even. It should carefully form 
the habit in the pupil's mind of connecting all 
new attainments in knowledge or skill with 
those already made and at the same time of 
shaping them for a like connection with what are 
to follow. Three things are necessary here : 
first, that the past attainment be revived ; sec- 



CONDITIONS OF EFIECTIVE WORK. 89 

ondly, that a positive increase be made to it ; 
and thirdly, that preparation be made for further 
advance. Systematic reviewing for this great 
end of securing a habit of steady growth is thus 
seen to be indispensable in successful training. 
In this peremptory requirement of securing a 
continuous growth is involved the prohibition 
of changes in studies, in teachers, in schools. 
Change here in itself is a great evil inasmuch as 
it necessarily more or less interrupts growth. If 
change be made, the reasons for it should be 
clear and imperative. 

§ 3^- (5-) A fifth condition in effective educa- 
tion is that it be wisely provident of the means, 
the appliances, and the helps needful, both in a 
general way of equipment in the way of build- 
ings, libraries, apparatus, specimens, and also 
particularly for each particular lesson or study. 
This is a condition which has a broad sweep, but 
can be explicated only in the way of exemplifica- 
tion of a few particulars. They are such as 
these : place for study and for practice as also 
for receiving instruction, that shall be attractive, 
neat and tasteful, quiet and remote from disturb- 
ance or distraction, furnished with comfortable 
seats and desks ; well warmed, well lighted, and 
well ventilated ; provided with reference books, 
maps, diagrams, specimens and generally objects 
needed for object lessons, etc. Free expenditure 
of money, time, labor, is warrantable if not 
rather obligatory, as estimated in the light of a 



go EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

richly endowed and quickened mind. Nowhere 
is parsimony or niggardliness more baneful than 
in education. 

§ 17' (^0 ^ sixth condition of effective edu- 
cation is that it be watcJifiil ajid precautionary. 
Thrifty farming involves not only generous 
fertilization but also good fencing. A vigilant 
and energetic prevention of whatever can 
obstruct the work of training is imposed as an 
urgent duty on every educator in whatever 
department of trust or care. The comprehen- 
sive principle here is that the mind of the learner 
be perfectly guarded against all obstructions, all 
interruptions, all distractions in order that it 
may be wholly absorbed in the one duty of the 
time. Noise without and noise within, sights 
foreign to the present task that dazzle, or amuse, 
or only entertain and occupy the thought ; out- 
door occupations, remembered sports, antici- 
pated pleasures, and the ten thousand other 
distractions incident to a student's life, are, so 
far as may be, carefully to be guarded against. 
A teacher must ever keep an open eye over 
all surroundings. 

§ 38. (7.) One additional condition in effect- 
ive educational work needs to be specified : — it 
is that it associate with itself judicious recreation- 
Recreation is not absolute rest. Such rest 
indeed is but another name for death. Even in 
that chief rest for man — the nightly sleep — there 
is large activity. The heart beats on, the lungs 



CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK. 9 1 

heave, the blood circulates ; and mind as well as 
body participates in the activity, recalling past 
acts and affections, shaping new forms of objects 
and new courses of events, working out intellect- 
ual problems, and even framing new purposes and 
new dispositions. Recreation implies only rela- 
tive rest ; relaxing strain of effort or changing 
the function at work. It is a law of nature in her 
kind and wise provision that no department of 
our beincr be left to inaction. The law aims at 
the same result as the volatility already noticed 
in early life — the symmetrical development of 
the whole being. It is a law that educational 
systems, all educational work indeed, must in 
wisdom recognize and enforce. 

The essential character and design of recrea- 
tion disclose to our view divers attributes which 
are to be adopted as principles to regulate it. 
First, it must obviously be wisely adapted to 
the age and degree of development, the task 
in hand, the condition generally. Early age 
demands, as before noticed, great frequency in 
the changes of study and practice, as well as of 
the condition generally of body and mental 
relationship. Mature life feels the need of 
fewer changes, if yet more thorough as well in 
pursuits as in condition. Tasks that are new, 
little practiced, before the spontaneities of action 
have become developed, are more fatiguing and 
hence are more in need of frequent recreation, 
than the old, the practiced, the familiar. The 



92 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

kind of change for salutary recreation varies, 
too, indefinitely with age, sex, study and occu- 
pation, as well as condition generally ; judicious 
recreation thus must be adaptive to particular 
needs and occasions. 

Secondly, recreation should be preferably 
ediicatory. It should conspire with the serious 
work of education and be in harmony with it. 
As the benefits of recreation result in a large 
degree from simple change of occupation, this 
co-operation of recreatory service may for the 
most part be easily effected. 

Thirdly, recreation becomes more effective in 
more contrasted change; as from mind to body; 
from book-study to oral recitation ; from indi- 
vidual to concert exercises ; from abstract 
studies to the more concrete ; from indoor con- 
finement to outdoor freedom, and the like. 
Contrast thus enters into the very essence of rec- 
reation ; and should be intelligently introduced 
in appointing and regulating it. 

Fourthly, recreation must be attractive. The 
change which it proposes should preferably be 
such as to excite and to gratify. It may often 
call for stimulations from without itself. There 
may be mentioned here two elements which are 
in themselves of a somewhat foreign character to 
proper recreation, but which may with judicious 
care be enlisted. One is the element of chance. 
It is this which gives ^ peculiar charm to hunt- 
ing fishing, as well as to many kinds of games. 



CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE WORK. 93 

The caution to be prescribed here is that the 
tendency to substitute reHance on luck or good 
fortune for honest and wisely directed effort, a 
tendency only too common, should receive no 
encouragement or strengthening. The other 
element is that of competition — an element 
abundantly exemplified and illustrated in all 
educational life. 

Fifthly, the most effective recreation must be to 
a very predominating degree a veritable change 
from zvork to play. In other words, it must 
release from the bondage of task-work, from the 
tension of strained muscle or mental faculty, to 
the freedom and relaxation of the instinctive, 
spontaneous, self-prompted and self-supported 
outgoings natural to life itself. Recreation is 
thus in its highest form play, in the sense of a 
free spontaneous outgoing and ongoing of the 
physical and spiritual nature of man. Its full 
necessity suggests at once that freedom is the 
highest condition and ultimate destiny of man. 
Happy will be that condition of the race in 
which it shall not be a rare exotic, but verily 
indigenous in a redeemed and perfected nature. 
Wise recreation may serve both as encouraging 
symbol and efficient help in its advance. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SPECIAL MODIFICATIONS OK EDUCATIONAL 
WORK. — I. PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 

§ 39. The twofold character of educational 
work and the conditions, intrinsic and extrinsic, 
of its successful prosecution being determined, 
the way is prepared for the fuller exposition of 
its nature as it is effected in the several depart- 
ments of human life and activity. The two com- 
prehensive departments are those of the Body, 
and of the Mind or Spirit — the Physical and the 
Mental or Spiritual. It is necessary however 
to bear in mind that the body and the spirit in 
man compose a single organism, so that the 
highest health and vigor of no part or member 
can be secured without a corresponding condi- 
tion of health and vigor in the other parts and 
members and in the whole composite organism. 
Education must accordingly in its direction of 
its specific work in any part keep in full view the 
demands of the whole man. Idiosyncrasy of 
temperament or peculiarity of condition and cir- 
cumstances may indeed lead to special prepon- 
derance of this or that kind of culture ; bodily 
force and agility may in one man eclipse his intel- 
94 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 95 

ligence and even his morality while in another 
spiritual eminence may shine forth from out of a 
feeble body ; the largest wealth of endowment 
and culture in human society generally may 
involve a great diversity of gifts and attainments 
in its individual members. Still the truth re- 
mains: the best culture of the particular must be 
vitally affected by the culture of the whole 
organism. The principle holds : if one member 
suffers, the whole body suffers ; and, conversely, 
the well-being of the whole is conditional to the 
well-being' of the particular member. Man is a 
unit ; he has one life, one vital energy, that per- 
vades both body and spirit and makes them 
vitally one. 

§ 40. Of the several properties of true educa- 
tional work in the care of the body accordingly, 
is to be enumerated, first, that it be such as will 
best train to the best ministry to the ivJwle man, 
and also at the same time be in subordination to 
the mental or spiritual life. The spirit is higher 
in rank than the body ; mental health and vigor 
are more than physical well-being. While often 
the cares of the body must engross attention and 
the mind be for the time out of thought, still 
this culture of the physical frame should ever 
be regarded as helpful condition of the para- 
mount culture of the spirit. The best condition 
of the mortal body is that of best ministry to 
the welfare of the immortal spirit that inhabits 
it. 



96 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

§ 41. A second property of true educational 
work of this class is that it recognizes tJie lazv of 
habit. This great law of life is that a given 
activity being put forth in any direction, it will 
continue to move on in that direction till 
arrested or diverted by some other force and to 
repeat itself on every recurring occasion. As 
exercise brings strength, continued activity thus 
grows in itself more vigorous ; and as the sympa- 
thetic nature of an organism causes every move- 
ment to draw along with it all associated activ- 
ities, it multiplies its allies and aids all along its 
course. This is the principle of growth. Edu- 
cation should therefore maintain a continuous 
culture ; should guard against interruptions other 
than those of needful rest or higher or more 
imperious demands. The law of habit has its 
limitations ; it is limited by the law of satiety in 
the case of food or alimentation and of fatigue in 
exercise. But it is of the highest consideration 
in all nurture and training; and should be turned 
to the best account. It prescribes regularity 
and uniformity in food and training, forbidding 
change except for reason. Such reason there 
may be from the limitations named of satiety 
and fatigue ; and still more from the necessity of 
a development of all the divers faculties of our 
nature which is incompatible with a too exclusive 
attention to one. It is still a law which within 
its own realm must be recognized and obeyed. 
Under its beneficent working judicious educa- 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 



97 



tion carefully nourishes up and trains some par- 
ticular activity until the stage of self-subsistence 
and guidance is reached when the activity will 
cease to require further care and will itself lend a 
fostering and helpful ministry to other activities 
to be in like manner nurtured up to maturity 
and self-support. Habit, moreover, becoming a 
kind of second niture, makes easy and attractive 
or even well-nigh compulsory or necessary what 
had been difficult or repulsive. It quickens 
every sense as well as every active function. 
Education therefore, we see in a new light, 
shuns as one of the worst evils change in food or 
training, till maturity is attained, unless for 
decisive reason. 

§ 42. A third characteristic of true educa- 
tional work in its special application to individual 
subjects is that it suffers itself to be prompted 
and guided by natural instincts, by actual experi- 
ences, by social conditions. Nature is a wise 
leader; and experience is her best interpreter. 
She demands that she be trusted largely even in 
healing and restoring, much more in developing 
a healthy nature. She is true to herself ; and 
the uniformity of her workings creates and vali- 
dates experience. She is in sympathy too with 
all environing influences of every kind. Common 
sense is her mouth-piece and is to be followed in 
wise educational work; as it forbids the erratic, 
the novel, the extravagant. Reason indeed rules 
common sense and imposes limitations at need. 
7 



98 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

Reason favors progress, improvement ; and pre- 
scribes such change as true progress requires. 
Reason too, with the general assent of common 
sense, also summons medical wisdom and skill to 
the aid of nature in exceptional, abnormal cases, 
for which the generality and needful uniformity 
of natural laws hinder her from making adequate 
provision. Still farther it is necessary to con- 
sider the peculiarities of age, sex, family, and 
social relationships, together with outward cir- 
cumstances, also, as those of soil, climate, and 
the like. 

But inasmuch as it is an integral part of a 
good and true education to nourish and develop 
the bodily nature for its own sake as well as still 
more emphatically for the sake of the mind or 
spirit that animates and uses it, education will 
do what lies in its power, to develop into their 
most perfect condition all the divers functions of 
the animal system. It will seek to secure for the 
digestive function wholesome food, at fitting and 
regular intervals, in ample supply and suitable 
variety — animal and vegetable, shunning the 
noxious and harmful intoxicant or stimulant and 
preventing all excess in indulgence of natural 
appetite. It will wisely see to it that for the 
respiratory function there be a full supply of 
pure air of suitable temperature and neither too 
moist nor too dry, and that all hindrances to its 
freest exercise from dress or other cause be re- 
moved. It will also provide for a generous and 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 99 

unobstructed circulation of nourishing blood, 
pervading all parts of the system, so as to supply 
needful warmth or heat for all life's movements 
as well to supply all waste by judicious, systematic 
exercise. Here it must be borne in mind that 
even in ease and indolence, nature herself carries 
on a steady activity as she exercises the various 
bodily functions. She thus cares for the invalid 
or the imprisoned ; but she imposes farther duty 
on the normal condition, as she urges to the 
vigorous outputting of the bodily forces. These 
she puts on service in order to meet her full de- 
mands for a healthy circulation. It is to be 
added that there is activity which stimulates cir- 
culation in the brain ; and this, as life advances, 
replaces the muscular activity which earlier life 
maintains. Then there are to be enlisted the 
divers aids of wholesome and invigorating exer- 
cise which come from companionship, provoking 
rivalry and animating by sympathetic and 
rhythmic movements of voice or hands or 
feet, prompted and regulated by music, as made 
familiar in the systems of calisthenics, gymnas- 
tics, and athletics of recent times. Over all 
wholesome physical exercise the law of recreation 
presides, forbidding together with all violence 
and grossness in quality also all excess in con- 
tinuance. 

It is in boyhood and youth that physical edu- 
cation does its best and most necessary work. 
As Horace taught : the winner of the race of 



100 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

life is he that endured and worked ; that sweat 
and shivered, when a boy. 

Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam 
Multa tulit fecitque puer ; sudavit et alsit. 



II. MENTAL EDUCATION.— I. ^ESTHETIC. 

§ 43. The human mind, which is essentially 
of an active nature, distributes its activity into 
a threefold functional form. These three func- 
tions, familiarly known as the Sensibility, the 
Intelligence, and the Will make up the entire 
activity of the mind. They each have their 
proper object in exact natural correspondence 
each to its respective function. The beautiful or 
the perfect in form is the one sole object to the 
sensibility ; the true to the intelligence ; the 
good, in the broad sense as the perfect in char- 
acter and condition, is the legitimate object of 
the will. In other words, the Sensibility, the 
Intelligence, and the Will constitute the three- 
fold functional or subjective divisions of mental 
phenomena, while the beautiful, the true, and the 
good make up the corresponding threefold objec- 
tive classification of those phenomena. We have 
thus given us this fundamental law of mental 
education that the beautiful, embracing under this 
broad designation the perfect in form, the imper- 
fect in form, and the positively ugly, be the one 
object to which the mind in its function of sensi- 
bility is to address itself ; that the true, embrac- 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— I. /ESTHETIC. lOI 

ing the absolutely true, the imperfectly true, and 
the positively false, be the one object to which 
the intelligence is to address its activity ; and, 
lastly, that the good, in the broad sense of the 
term, including the perfectly good, the imperfect 
in character or condition and the positively bad, 
be the one object to which the will is to address 
itself. ThQ beautiful, the true, and the good are 
accordingly the food and means of training for 
the respective mental functions. 

Moreover, any object with which the mind may 
engage itself or of which it can have any idea, 
may engage either function, not however in equal 
degree or like facility in all cases. Any object 
may thus be regarded as true or beautiful or good 
at the pleasure of the mind itself or under the 
lead of a teacher. In truth every object thus in- 
teracting with the mind must engage the mind as 
a unit ever bearing along with it in every form 
of its activity, each of its threefold functions, 
while any one may more prominently and, as we 
in inexact but approximating phrase say, exclu- 
sively, command its attention. Consequently 
the education of one function necessarily affects 
the others ; and thus taste, knowledge, conduct, 
must in every form and kind of teaching all 
engage the notice and care of the teacher. We 
encounter here a seeming contradiction between 
two maxims, each of prime importance to the 
educator ; the first bidding him to '* keep all his 
eyes about him," to note everything ; the other 



102 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

to '' do one thing at a time," — concentrate the 
attention on a single point. Both are as practi- 
cable as are most maxims, and no more so. The 
vigilant seaman sweeps with his eye the entire 
surface of the sea to the limits of his horizon, 
not a visible thing moving or resting escaping 
his vision, while yet he watches with the closest 
attention every movement of a vessel of suspi- 
cious character. It is as true of the eye of the 
mind as of the eye of the body that a penumbra 
surrounds every object however carefully circum- 
scribed. This very penumbra from extraneous 
objects is indeed practically, often if not always, 
a help and support and relief in long concen- 
trated attention. 

§ 44. The aesthetic nature, as understood in 
the accurate scientific use of the phrase, includ- 
ing both the sensibility and the imagination 
which are respectively the active and passive 
sides of this function, presents a very broad and 
a most important field for educational work. 
The function is properly designated as tJie func- 
tion of form. It is that attribute of mind by 
which it communicates with other minds; by 
which also it communes with itself, reveals itself 
to itself, and is the primal condition of conscious- 
ness, of all self-sense, all self-knowledge, all self- 
direction. It is an inseparable element of mental 
life. Every specific affection and act of the mind 
takes on a form, a character ; the mind as a 
whole has thus a form abiding under an un- 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— I. ESTHETIC. 103 

ceasing change, still with more or less con- 
stancy. 

An analysis of form — aesthetic form in its broad 
scientific sense — gives us at once three elements 
or constituents : — first, an idea to be revealed or 
communicated ; secondly, a matter in which and 
by which it is limited or formed ; and, thirdly, 
an embodying act putting this idea into this 
forming or limiting matter. All the laws both of 
the reception and interpretation and also of the 
communication and production of beauty or the 
perfect in form, ground themselves on this analy. 
sis. The one comprehensive principle or law of 
this function of form so far as the active side 
or the production of form — the expression or 
communication of idea — is that \.\\q fitting idea 
he fittingly embodied in the fitting matter. The 
diversities and gradations of special forms are 
thus determined by the diversity and character 
(i) of the special ideas expressed ; (2) the matter 
in which they are expressed ; and (3) the expres- 
sing act, from the perfect in form — perfect beauty 
— down through the imperfect to the ugly. 

§ 45. Esthetic education has for its special 
charge the nurture and development of this 
function of form in both its passive and active 
sides — the Sensibility and the Imagination. The 
leading characteristics of the passive side, the 
reception of form — have been already given. 
§ 29, They are these : i. Ready sympathy — a 
hearty and wakeful interest or spirit of commu- 



I04 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

nication — with all surrounding objects offering 
interaction with the mind. The selection of the 
most fitting objects, the protection against op- 
posing forces, and the enlistment of helpful forces, 
and the like are involved here both on the part 
of the teacher and also of the pupil, who is to be 
trained to a right and ready habitual use of these 
subsidiary operations. 2. An exact and full 
apprehension of the interacting object. For this 
there must be allowance of time in order that the 
impression of the object may be completely 
effected in all its essential outlines and colorings. 
All needful correction of impeded or diverted 
communication is also required. 3. A thorough 
assimilation of the impression thus made is to 
finish out the process of a right reception of 
object. 

Here is to be found a fundamental, if some- 
what difficult work for the educator. It is how- 
ever to be performed mostly in an incidental way 
when other ends of education, as those of knowl- 
edge or of practical skill, are predominant and 
guiding. The educator may thus enforce atten- 
tion to what is said or shown to his pupil, holding 
him responsible for what his senses of hear- 
ing and of sight have done, with the requisite 
alertness and sympathetic interest and patience, 
so as to fulfill all the conditions of a full assimila- 
tion of the impression into the mental life. 

§ 46. After the assimilation there follows ac- 
cording to the analysis before given, § 29, the 



MENTAL EDUCATION :— I. ESTHETIC. 10$ 

stage of mental experience in which the passive 
or receptive element disappears and the active 
nature begins to discover itself. The mental 
food is assimilated ; the mind is correspondingly 
affected by it ; it is shaped and colored, — is so 
far formed by it. Its active being is different 
from what it was and must ever remain so. Its 
form is changed and, subject to new modifica- 
tions of this form, there is an abiding character 
of the mind resulting from the impression, the 
apprehension, and the assimilation. Here we 
find the retentive attribute of mind. The mind 
from every impression, from every act and affec- 
tion, receives what it in some way and degree 
retains as a present, living part of its own active 
being. 

The power to retain is the condition of all 
mental growth. Its place and relation in this 
growth we have now fully determined. It de- 
pends on the assimilation of the food communi- 
cated and apprehended. But it is not the orig- 
inal impression, much less the impressing object, 
in its identical substance or form, which is re- 
tained. The body under the digestive process 
does not retain the original wheaten grits or 
the muscular chops in their identical substance 
and form after the digestive work — the insaliva- 
tion of the one and the gastric decomposition of 
the other — has done or has even begun its work. 
No food enters the proper life of body or mind 
unless digested or assimilated ; and no digested 



Io6 EDUCATlOxVAL WORK. 

or assimilated food is identical in substance or 
form with its original self.^ Its substance has taken 
in something from that of the body or mind ; 
and its form has ceased to be food form ; it is 
now living bodily or mental form. All that re- 
mains of it at last is in the body or mind so far 
as formed by it. The education — the develop- 
ment and training of this important element of 
mental health and vigor — is a very practicable 
matter. It may be effected to a certain ex- 
tent by specific exercises ; but chiefly it ivill 
be effected in incidental ways, as will be 
seen hereafter. It must never be forgotten 
that the entire mental experience, every 
act and every affection, every feeling, thought, 
and purpose, come within the scope of this 
retentive function. We remember our feelings 
and our determinations as well as our thoughts. 
The general laws of retentiveness are the same 
for all those forms of mental experience. The 
principle underlying all specific rules is this : 
every act and affection of the mind abides in some 
form a7id degree. The first of these specific rules 
prescribes a judicious selection as to the objects 
which shall be allowed to impress the mind and 
the allowance of only true thoughts, 'worthy feel- 
ings, and right purposes, in regard to these objects. 
A second rule, which aims to preserve the origi- 
nal impression in exactest form, requires that the 
impression be as full and distinct as possible ; 
that it be incorporated at the time into the live- 



MENTAL EDUCATION.-— I. ESTHETIC. 10^ 

liest activity of the mind ; and that the impres- 
sion be strengthened by repetition. 

§ 47. The next stage in the imaginative process 
according to our analysis is the reproductive 
stage. The retained experience, whether feeling, 
thought, or purpose, is revived. It is familiarly 
but vaguely known as recollection : — it is memory 
not merely as retentive but as reproductive. This 
reproduction is of course more or less difTerent 
from the original act or affection ; — the original 
experience reappears in a form more or less modi- 
fied. It may be characterized as spontaneous, 
under only a permissive interference of the will ; 
or it may be voluntary, being positively evoked 
and directed by the will. 

The development and training of this repro- 
ductive function of the mind — the memory — have 
received a very large share of the consideration 
of educators and philosophers, as well as of spe- 
cial teachers. We have manifold systems of 
mnemonics, arts of memory, laws of association. 
Doubtless from them more or less practical bene- 
fit has been derived ; and they are entitled to 
their full commendation. Even charlatanry has 
its merit : else it could not live. But the simple 
and plain exposition of the mental phenomenon 
called " memory," appears in the analysis we 
have given. The training of this function pos- 
sesses in it a true scientific guidance. The con- 
ditions of a good memory are obvious. Vivid 
impression^ accurate apprehcnsio7i and assimilation, 



I08 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

and firm retention are essential conditions. Con- 
tinued definite practice under those conditions in 
modes and ways judiciously selected, is the effi- 
cient factor in the culture of the reproductive 
memory whether as spontaneous or voluntary. 

§ 48. The next following stage in the imagi- 
native process combines with the original experi- 
ence as reproduced associated mental acts and 
affections. We seek thus in recollecting to re- 
vive some particular act or feeling by recalling 
the scene, the occasion, the outer surroundings 
and the inner associations. We cannot remem- 
ber at all without something of this modification 
of the original impression. But the modification 
may go so far as to give a distinct character to 
the memory. This power to reproduce freely 
and fully the past with the associations as deter- 
mined by the condition or purpose at the time is 
an attainment, demanding the careful attention 
of the educator. But the principles of training 
are now obvious; the modes of training will pre- 
sent themselves in connection with the other 
modes of training the function of form. 

§ 49. The last and highest stage of the imag- 
inative process is the properly creative stage. At 
this stage the reproductive movement has sunk 
the original impression so far below the associated 
experience, has so absorbed the past element 
into the present, that we have what may allow- 
ably be termed a creation. But the creation is a 
new form only. The imagination in itself is con- 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— I. .ESTHETIC. IO9 

cerned with form and with form alone. In it 
the mind takes from itself as a body of faculties 
and mental riches and from those it puts itself 
forth in some new mode or form. The function 
has a wide scope and is a vital element in char- 
acter, in power of achievement in all the depart- 
ments of human life — in study and intellectual 
culture and in conduct as well as in proper art. 

The three constituents of all aesthetic form 
have been already enumerated; idea to be ex- 
pressed; matter in which it is to be expressed ; 
and the expressing act or the embodying of the 
idea in the matter. The training must accord- 
ingly be along these lines. The specific ways or 
modes will be best indicated in a general sum- 
mary of the modes of educating the aesthetic 
function of the human mind. The success of the 
educator will depend on his care to systematize 
all his work in this field of training, keeping his 
work ever in mind, pursuing it steadily, making 
every occasion tributary to a true growth, carry- 
ing forward in short a constant development 
towards an ideal of aesthetic excellence both on 
the receptive and on the productive side. 

§ 50. I. Esthetic education finds a common 
and ready occasion in the regulation of the pcj^- 
sonal appearance and carriage. '^ Good form " 
here, in the larger and better import of the 
phrase, should ever be enforced, if for no other 
purpose, simply as a condition and means of 
aesthetic training. Neatness in person and dress ; 



no EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

decency in attitude and posture, courtesy in 
manners, straightforwardness and freedom in 
movement of limb*, are the leading parts of 
aesthetic training here. A principle ever and 
everywhere to be exemplified and enforced of 
fullest applicability here is : " Let all things be 
done decently and in order." 

II. Other abundant occasions for training in 
this field are furnished in the exercise of ihe 
senses. All formWs communicative in its essential 
nature — receiving and imparting , and the senses 
are a principal medium for this communicating 
work. Eyes that shall be open and quick to ob- 
serve, ears ready to catch all sounds in their 
diverse character and significance, touch sensitive 
and heedful, are largely susceptible of training. 
The home, the walk, the journey, the class room, 
the school, abound with occasions for educational 
work here, both in positively developing capa- 
bility, and also in repressing listlessness, indiffer- 
ence, aversion. Then on the active side all 
expression should be in fitting look and voice, in 
attitude and gesture. In all speech, in interro- 
gating and in answering, as In all written expres- 
sions of idea, the aesthetic sense — a quick and 
accurate taste — and also the aesthetic faculty — a 
vivid, sympathetic, affective imagination — may 
receive culture. 

§ 51. III. The reproductive function, proper 
memory, invites and 'demands a very prominent 
part in all systematic education. The opportuni- 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— I. ALSTHETIC I 1 I 

ties of training are given in manifold ways. In- 
cidentally while other specific ends are sought, 
the memory may receive attention, as particularly 
in the preparation of lessons, in which accuracy 
and thoroughness in acquiring should be com- 
bined with a sense of responsibility for the char- 
acter of the acquisition. A pervasive principle of 
education has here an important special applica- 
tion : — that every particular study and exercise be 
regarded as entering into and determining all suc- 
ceeding proficiency — nothing now but what will 
reappear consciously or unconsciously hereafter. 
The faculty of reproductive memory is incident- 
ally exercised also in the '' recitation " and exam- 
ination upon the lesson. Reviewing comes in 
here as a most effective means of developing 
memory. Frequent and systematic rehearsals of 
discourse in prose and more beneficially perhaps 
in poetry, proper declamations, are familiar helps 
to memory. We have here indeed a function 
that admits of a well-nigh indefinite degree of 
development. A good strong memory is the fruit 
of training — of determined, earnest, continuous, 
judicious training. 

IV. Once more, a thorough education must 
seek to develop and train a proper creative imag- 
ination. The active function of form takes on 
this character when it gives forth a new, original 
idea of any kind, or puts it into a new body of 
matter — whether it be physical, as figure and 
color, or in wood or stone or soil, or in sound. 



112 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

and the like, as in the plastic arts, in architecture, 
landscape, music ; or in spiritual matter as in the 
poetic art ; or still farther evinces a way of em- 
bodying that is more or less new and original, in 
respect of grace or fitness, or of vigor. 

II. INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 

§51. The development of the Intellect in 
man follows naturally that of the Function of 
Form or the Sensibility and the Imagination. 
The intellect waits, for the most part at least, 
on the aesthetic function for the object on which 
its activity is to be exerted. The impressed 
objects of the sense and the ideas reproduced in 
the memory or re-formed in the imagination 
awaken the intelligence or cognitive function at 
the first and so condition and shape to a greater 
or less extent the entire intellectual process that 
follows. Leaving out of view the intellectual 
processes that are founded on other preceding 
intellectual products, there is but one exception 
to the general statement that the intelligence 
ever follows a presentation by the function of 
Form, depending upon it and being conditioned 
by it. In the interaction between any exterior 
object and the mental activity, as the mind is 
in any exercise of any particular function ever 
present in its entirety of functions, nothing 
forbids the notion that the intellectual function 
may in some cases immediately interact ^Yith the 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— II. INTELLECTUAL. I13 

object without any intervention of the sense. 
In such case we may have an immediate percep- 
tion of the exterior object — may become cog- 
nizant of it, — not, however, properly conscious 
of it, for this involves a contradiction of terms. 
But in the general the sense or the memory or 
the imagination, some mode of the function of 
form, gives to the intelligence its datum. It is 
the sense receiving the object that first thus 
awakens the intelligence, which cannot act or 
reveal itself except on condition of some object 
being presented to it. 

§ 52. The analysis of any intellectual act 
gives at once as the two essential factors i, the 
knozving subject ; 2, the object known., that is, the 
true in the object. The two factors, as before 
indicated, are in exact correspondence. Farther, 
it is immediately discernible that all knowing is 
a process in time, which admits of being distin- 
guished into two stages, the one inchoative and 
incomplete, familiarly designated perception ; the 
other the matured and complete, technically 
termed thought or proper knoivledge. Perception 
ever tends to pass on to a mature knowledge or 
thought ; it may, however, be arrested, as the 
tree-life tends to spray and leaf and fruit, but 
may be arrested in its work ere it reach its natur- 
ally destined end. Perception more passively 
apprehends the object as a concrete. Thought 
actively affirms it to be such or so, in other words 
to have or not to have such or such attributes. 
8 



114 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

The culture of this function, the supplying of 
food to it and training it to acquire and to com- 
municate knowledge or truth, has constituted 
the chief, often the exclusive, claim to the care of 
the educator. To educate has generally been 
deemed to be simply to furnish and train the 
intelligence or function of knowledge. How- 
ever crude and faulty this notion may be held to 
be, nothing can be more unquestionable than 
that a prime qualification in the educator is a 
correct understanding of the essential nature of 
this function and its relationships as well as of 
its generic forms and laws. Ignorance here 
would seem the very quintessence of quackery. 
A summary mention, at least, of the leading 
facts of the intelligence is requisite in order to a 
right conception of the work of education in 
dealing with it. 

If I should present to any class of pupils of 
ordinary intelligence in our schools a rose and 
should put to them the question : What do you 
perceive, the reply would be prompt and univer- 
sal. The unhesitating answer would show that 
everybody knows what perception is. If I 
should go on to ask : What do you tJiink of it ? 
The reply might be prompt, but not probably so 
harmonious. One would say: I think it is 
beautiful ; another, I think it is red ; a third, it 
is sweet ; a fourth, it has five petals, etc. The 
answers however all alike evince that they know 
what to think is. The answers show that while 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— 11. INTELLECTUAL. II5 

the object remains the same, the mind, the intel- 
ligence, has passed from one stage to another ; 
that the one stage — perception — is primary and 
conditional : that the other stage — thinking — is 
natural and sure to follow if opportunity be given. 
It is obvious that the latter stage differs from 
the former in this one particular: an attribute, 
as ''beautiful," ''red," "sweet," "five petaled," 
has been affirmed of the object ; the rose is in 
one respect " beautiful," in another " red," and so 
on ; in other words the rose is identified, in the act 
which is knozvn as tJiinking, with an atti'ibute or 
property. Such is the simple nature of thought 
as technically distinguished from perception. It 
is true that there was in every case of reply a 
selection of one attribute out of many — a dis- 
crimination. But if only one attribute were 
apprehended, there would of course be no dis- 
crimination, so that this movement of the mind 
is not essential, but only incidental and subsid- 
iary to thought. Further, this is all that enters 
into the nature of thought as a completed act of 
knowledge — to ascribe or to deny an attribute to 
the object. Thought thus is simply attribution. 
It ever takes the form of what is known techni- 
cally as the judgment, which is properly defined 
as "knowledge under an attribute." 

In this transition from the initial and simply 
inchoative to the final and completed stage of 
knowledge a noticeable transformation has taken 
place ; the simplicity of the perception has passed 



Il6 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

into the triplicity of the thought or judgment — 
one has become three. We have at the end (i) 
that of which we think, — a subject ; (2) that 
which we think of it — an attribute ; and (3) the 
thinking act itself, the affirmation or denial — the 
attribution — in the technical copula. The two 
first named constituents of the thought — the 
so-called terms — are known as concepts. They 
imply each the other; neither can possibly be 
without the other. They come into existence 
together simultaneously with the judgment, as 
its organic constituents, just as head and limbs 
begin their life simultaneously with the bodily 
life. It is a profound mistake to think of a con- 
cept as existing before the judgment or mature 
act of knowledge ; and equally a mistake to 
identify a perception or percept with a concept 
except simply as being related to the same 
object. 

It may not be amiss to call distinct attention 
here to the ambiguities of language in respect to 
the use and significance of the terms employed 
to denote mental phenomena, and to the conse- 
quent liability to misconception and error in rea- 
soning. The word rose thus may be used to 
mean divers things. It may mean simply a word, 
and either a spoken word or a written word ; it 
may mean the external object itself ; or the per- 
ception of it — a proper percept ; or a thought of 
it as having some attribute — a concept. Now it 
is very obvious that these different things, all 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— 11. INTELLECTUAL. I I 7 

denoted by the same word — rose — have different 
attributes, and that to ascribe to one of these ob- 
jects the attribute proper to another, as to say that 
" the word rose is fragrant " is to ascribe falsely, 
to fall into error. Just so, as denoting a percept 
it allows certain attributes which do not pertain 
to it when denoting a concept. In other words 
the percept rose has attributes which do not 
belong to the concept rose ; and to confound 
them leads to error. It is true that ordinarily 
the general intention in the use of the term and 
the connections will suffice to prevent this confu- 
sion and error. But in proper psychological dis- 
cussion and consequently in intellectual training 
the clear discrimination becomes of commanding 
importance. A proper percept never of itself 
recognizes the distinction of subject and attri- 
bute ; a proper concept always from its very 
essence implies this distinction. 

§ 53. There are three comprehensive move- 
ments of the intelligence in its treatment of judg- 
ments or the matured forms of knowledge which 
educational work should have under practical con- 
trol. They are, first, the enlargement — or so- 
called amplification of the concept — which may 
respect the subject concept and thus appearing in 
the familiar and important process of generaliza- 
tion, or the attribute concept, as in the process of 
the technical determination. The principle vali- 
dating the process is that either concept may be 
amplified if ever the vital organic relation be- 



Il8 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

tween them be observed — we can generalize only 
where we have the same attribute ; we can deter- 
mine only where we have the same subject. In 
other words, in amplifying either one of two con- 
genital concepts the other must be the base or 
governing principle. 

Farther, the intelligence may deduce a con- 
tained truth or judgment from another which 
contains it. This is the familiar deductive move- 
ment of thought. 

Thirdly, the intelligence may infer — induce — 
one part from another part of the same whole. 
This is the familiar inductive movement of 
thought. It is exemplified abundantly in common 
life as when the child shuns a flame after having 
once felt its burning heat, and most conspicuously 
in science, as when the geologist on finding a fossil 
bone at once induces from the fact that it is a 
part of some organic whole that there must have 
been other parts or organs belonging to the same 
whole, and so proceeding from part to part and 
putting together the results he comes to know 
that a mastodon had once lived and died and left 
a part of itself in that locality. The deductive 
and the inductive processes are true complement- 
aries, as evidently there can be in the generic 
relation of quantity only the two movements, 
that between the whole and the parts and that 
between one part and another part. 

The work of education has thus set before it 
the precise nature of the mental activity known 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— II. INTELLECTUAL. II9 

as the intelligence and all its generic forms. It 
has accordingly two stages in knowledge — first, 
the inchoative act, perception or the simple appre- 
hension of the object ; and then, the matured 
stage, the judgment or the attributive act which 
after the needful discrimination simply identifies 
the attribute thus discriminated with the object 
or differences the attribute from it — affirms or 
denies the attribute as belonging to the object. 
The possible derivative processes from the judg- 
ment are the three ; (i), Amplification of the con- 
cept — whether subject or attribute — whether 
generalization or determination ; (2), Deduction, 
or the movement of thought between the whole 
and the parts; and (3), Induction, or the move- 
ment of thought from one part to another part of 
the same whole. It is the province of Logic to 
expound the laws and forms of thought. Every- 
body thinks and thinks serviceably in a degree to 
his wants although he knows little or nothing of 
what thought is or what are its laws or forms, 
just as everybody eats, and eats serviceably in a 
degree to his health, although not one in ten 
thousand knows what digestion or distribution 
or assimilation of food is. But the thinker should 
understand thoroughly and familiarly the nature 
and forms of thought ; and the teacher should 
understand what kind of an activity he professes 
to train. A very conspicuous importance of this 
logical knowledge consists in this : that it enables 
one to knoiv that he knozvs wJiat he knoivs ; that 



I20 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

Study and scientific investigation, consciously fol- 
lowing the laws and legitimate forms of thought, 
is on the road to certitude of knowledge : that 
every step he takes leads to assured success. 
The inspiration that comes from this confidence 
is beyond estimation in all intellectual pursuits ; 
and logic, when it is rescued from the littlenesses 
and trivialities and the barbarous formulisms of 
scholastic teaching, and appears in full form and 
exact method as an unfolding of the simple 
nature of thought into its laws and forms with 
their organic relationships in their completest 
fullness and totality, while the exactest of sci- 
ences, is also the simplest and most comprehen- 
sible. How can the effective training of the 
intelligence proceed in ignorance of the laws and 
general forms of the intelligence? 

All educational work consisting of the two 
parts, nurture and exercise, the development and 
training of the intelligence, consists of the sup- 
plying of food — which to the intellect is ever 
the true — and the prescription of practice. In- 
tellectual growth comprises increase of knowledge 
and increase of strength and skill. But food is of 
value, chiefly at least, for the sustaining and pro- 
moting of health and vigor. Mere accumulation 
of knowledge is of little worth ; it may be a cum- 
brance and a hindrance. We acquire truth for 
use — for means and help to the advance of intel- 
lectual strength and efficiency. Moreover, the 
food of the intelligence is the object for its activ- 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— 11. INTELLECTUAL. 12 1 

ity. It is wise therefore to direct educational 
work mainly in the line of exercise. He who has 
the power to know has the key of knowledge ; 
and it is better to be able at will to unlock the 
treasury of all knowledge than merely to have 
one's scanty purse stuffed even to fullness. 

§ 55. I. Culture of the Perceptive Faculty. — 
Perception we have recognized as the funda- 
mental and conditional step in the intellectual life. 
But external perception, exercised upon exterior, 
physical objects is mainly, if not wholly through 
the bodily sense. It is in fact, with the exception 
before maintained, § 51, the immediate reaction 
of the intellect upon the sensation ; and follows 
instinctively upon it. A true and full perception, 
thus presupposes a true and full sensation, which 
involves, as we have seen, a sympathetic, appre- 
hensive, and assimilative process that is accurate, 
vivid, thorough. Internal perception, technically 
known as intuition, which is exercised on the 
acts and affections of the mind itself, involves the 
same qualities as external perception except so far 
as regards the object. It belongs properly to an 
advanced stage of intellectual grow^th ; but even 
the child may be led to observe his feelings, his 
thoughts, his intentions. Moreover, this funda- 
mental function is called forth all along in the line 
of the proper culture of other intellectual powers. 
Its culture may be best carried forth conse- 
quently in connection with the practice of those 
other dependent functions. But opportunities 



122 EDUCATIONAL IVOR A'. 

for putting the perceptive or observational faculty 
in exercise and so of guiding or training it 
abound everywhere. Any external object, any 
internal experience may be employed. The 
culture will seek everywhere to develop a 
habit of quick, interested, accurate, thorough ob- 
servation. The end sought will be such a habit 
of mind as will not only without special care 
prompt such observation, but will give one con- 
fidence that his observations are true and full. 
To be reasonably sure of having habitually ob- 
served aright is a most desirable attainment. 

§ 56. Culture of the Thinking Faculty. — As 
before intimated there may be recognized in an 
act of thinking an incipient stage — discrimination 
of attribute — and a matured stage — the actual 
judging. In all cases knowledge of an object is 
mediated through some one or more attributes. 
We know the rose only as it is presented to us as 
having form, color, fragrance, and the like — as 
having some attribute. Which of the manifold 
attributes belonging to an object shall engage 
our thought may be determined by the object 
itself obtruding on our notice this or that attri- 
bute; or by some condition or disposition in our- 
selves, as the attention of a child might be 
arrested by the color, or by the fragrance of the 
rose, while the student in botany might first 
notice the petals or the stamens. In these two 
cases the recognition of the attribute would be 
automatic or spontaneous. It might, however, 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— 11. INTELLECTUAL. 1 23 

be, as it often is in fact, of set purpose or Avill ; 
the botanist might purposely bend himself solely 
to the organic characters or attributes of the rose, 
while the child might seize it for its fragrance. 

Skill in the discrimination of attributes, as 
thus presented to the thought, is obviously 
of the first importance to ready and accurate 
thinking. It is indispensable to the educator's 
success and must be a commanding end or 
object to be secured for his pupil in his work. 
A familiar acquaintance with the generic classes 
of attributes thus becomes a matter of leading 
importance, not to say, of imperative necessity. 
The science of thought gives us this classifica- 
tion, in comprehensive terms : — All attributes 
must be intrinsic or extrinsic to the object to 
which they belong. Intrinsic attributes or Prop- 
erties are of two species : attributes of Quality, 
and attributes of Action. Those of Quality are 
normally expressed in the Grammatical Adjec- 
tive, as, the sun is bright ; those of action in the 
Grammatical Verb — the Intransitive, as, the sun 
shines, which, as the attribute of quality does 
not, suggests without designating the object, 
and the Transitive, that expressly limits the 
action to its object, as, the sun illuminates the 
earth. It is the same attribute brightness that 
is presented in each kind but modified diversely 
in each. All extrinsic attributes indicate some 
character of relation pertaining to the object, 
which of necessity must be either a relation to 



124 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

the whole to which the object belongs as part, 
or to some other part of that whole. 

The science of thought also names to us the 
few supreme categories of tJioiigJit, that is, the 
highest and most comprehensive classes of attri- 
butes that can be ascribed to thought. To the 
practical thinker this enumeration will be found 
of eminent service in guiding his discrimination, 
as it presents to his view the entire field of 
thinkable attributes in thought and being dis- 
tributed into a few comprehensive classes. 
There are three fundamental classes of these 
categories : — First, the categories of Pure 
Thought — identity, quantity, modality, which 
last includes the attributes of necessity and 
contingency : — 

Secondly, the categories of Pure Being — Real- 
ity, Activity : — 

Thirdly, the categories of Thought-Being — 
Substance and Cause.''" 

The work of education is evidently thus the 
exercise of the pupil in the systematic, con- 
tinuous, not desultory nor incidental even, dis- 
crimination of the attributes of objects. The 
work should of course continue so long or so far 
as to effect a practical mastery of the work to be 
done. Not a large number of objects nor a 
large number of exercises is necessary, just as 
the student of botany need not examine all the 

* Day's " Mental Science," § 193. 



MENTAL ED UCA TION :—II. INTELLECTUAL. 1 2 5 

specimens of a given flower in a field, to be able 
to identify it — to know it wherever he meets 
with it. The beginning would naturally be with 
objects of sense ; as first with those that address 
the sight, beginning say with the color. Objects 
with divers colors being presented, the pupil 
would be called to indicate the particular color. 
He might thus be introduced to all the leading 
kinds of color. In the same way, the attributes 
of figure as straight-lined and curved in all their 
respective varieties, as triangular, square, oblong, 
circular, oval, etc. Then objects addressing the 
ear, with the leading varieties of sound, partic- 
ularly of musical sounds. A like method could 
be pursued with objects addressing the other 
senses and also with internal or mental phenom- 
ena, as the feelings, thoughts, intentions. 

The consummating stage in the thinking proc- 
ess, as we have seen, is that of affirming or 
denying the attribute as belonging to the object; 
— of identifying the attribute with the object or 
differencing the attribute from it. The training 
here will of course be practicable in a thoroughly 
systematic way only at an advanced stage of 
education, in connection with studies in logical 
science. But even in the earlier stages some- 
thing very effective may be accomplished. If 
thus the study of one's vernacular language is in 
hand, the exercises in the construction of sen- 
tences, which are but judgments expressed in 
language, will be exercises in proper judging or 



120 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

thinking. Here will be necessarily involved the 
receptive or acquisitive function with the repro- 
ductive. The object must be apprehended as 
also the attribute discriminated, in order to the 
completed judgment. 

The culture of the judgment in its diverse 
forms leads to the training of the intelligence in 
the generic derivative processes of thought. The 
first, as already indicated, is the amplification of 
the concept with its twofold form of generaliza- 
tion which deals with the subject term of a judg- 
ment and of determination which deals with the 
attribute term. Generalizing or classifying, 
gathering into classes, in a legitimate way is 
urged by Lord Bacon as a method of scientific 
thought that had been to his time '* untried." 
This, scientific generalization, is the proper new 
Baconian method of science. He seems to have, 
known little, if anything beyond the name, of 
Induction, except that, like generalization, it 
begins with particulars. The one simple princi- 
ple ruling over all legitimate generalization is 
this : any number of objects having any one 
attribute common to them may be united 
in a class on the basis of that attribute ; as sun, 
stars, planets, are all conjoined, on the basis of 
the one attribute of light-giving, under the 
name of luminaries. The process of amplifying 
the attribute concept is under an analogous prin- 
ciple : any number of attributes may be com- 
bined into one aggregate or comprehensive 



MENTAL EDUCATION:— IL INTELLECTUAL. 12/ 

whole on the basis of being all known to be 
attributes of some one object. 

The twofold movements of thought in the 
relationship of Quantity or that of Whole and 
Parts, — the Deductive, moving between the whole 
and the parts, and the Inductive, moving between 
one part and another part of the same whole, — 
can properly be taught only in a rudimentary 
and anticipatory way until the education reaches 
the advanced stage in which logical science may 
wisely be studied. 

It must be apparent that the educator, espe- 
cially if he pursues his work beyond the rudimen- 
tary stage, should number among his necessary 
qualifications a thorough logical training or a 
training in the science of thought, so as to un- 
derstand the nature of thought, its fundamental 
laws, and its generic forms and so to be practi- 
cally master of the leading modifications of 
thought. Only in the light of this knowledge 
and with the help of this skill, can he wisely and 
successfully train the intelligence committed to 
his care. It must be borne in mind that all the 
great forms of thought are more or less called 
into exercise in a rudimentary way in the earlier 
stages of education. To develop and train by 
prescribing exercises, correcting errors, and the 
like, the faculty of right thinking must be before 
his mind from the beginning. In truth, a 
thorough training in logical science and in the 
art of right thinking, must be accounted as one 



128 EDUCATIOyAL WORK. 

of the most indispensable accomplishments of a 
liberal education. A great and noble science, 
the science of all sciences, it is worthy in itself of 
all honor; and as the nurse and guide of all 
intelligent and confident work in thinking it 
is a prime condition and helper to intellectual 
exertion in every department of study and 
rational life. Of course by logical science is here 
meant, as already hinted, the science of thought 
in its large comprehensive import — the science 
that, first seizing the essential nature of thought 
or knowledge, unfolds directly from this its gov- 
erning characteristics or laws and its possible 
forms in their true genesis and organic relation- 
ships. 



MENTAL EDUCATION. 1 29 



Educational Aphorisms for Elemen- 
tary Studies. 

There are certain branches of intellectual train- 
ing of such supreme and universal importance 
that no scheme of education worthy of the name 
can fail to notice them with special distinction. 
They are Spelling, Reading, Writing, Arith- 
metic, and Grammar as an art "of true and well 
speaking." *'To read the English language well," 
says Edward Everett , " to write with dispatch a 
neat> legible hand, and be master of the first 
four rules of arithmetic, so as to dispose at once, 
with accuracy, of every question of figures which 
comes up in practice — I call, this a good educa- 
tion. And if you add the ability to write pure, 
grammatical English, I regard it as an excellent 
education." 

It may be expedient, however, for a science of 
education to treat these branches in a more pop- 
ular and suggestive way, as the best modes 
of training will vary greatly in different com- 
munities varying in size, mental advancement, 
and other social conditions. These suggestions 
are here presented under the form of aphorisms 
in their application to the several studies, 
separately. 
9 



I30 



EDUCATIONAL WORK. 



I. Spelling. 



1. He who has learned to spell well has laid 
the best foundation for best proficiency in all 
studies. 

2. Spelling lessons are excellent object 
lessons, training to accurate observation and 
careful recollection and also, if properly arranged, 
to inductive and generalizing habits of thought. 

3. Spelling and Reading are correlatives ; the 
former names separately the written characters, 
the latter utters the united spoken elements of 
the word. One is analytic ; the other is synthetic. 
Each implies the other ; and training which 
is direct in either one is at the same time real 
but indirect in the other. 

4. The maxim ''one thing at a time" is no- 
where more imperative than in this first and fun- 
damental study. Distracted attention is a hin- 
drance to proficiency everywhere ; it is especially 
evil when the first habits of study are to be 
formed. Therefore here pronunciation, deriva- 
tion, meaning, gramrnar, history, geography, 
natural science, should be excluded from the 
thought except as incidental or as subservient 
and ancillary or as inferential. 

5. To spell is to tell the names of the charac- 
ters which compose the written word. The 
teacher gives the spoken word ; it is incumbent 
on him to pronounce accurately and distinctly. 



MENTA L ED UCA TION. I 3 I 

It is a good practice to pronounce each word in 
the lesson distinctly to the learner when the 
lesson is first assigned. Pronunciation is gener- 
ally best taught in this way. 

6. A good-text book is indispensable, for accu- 
racy, for thoroughness, for method, for review. 
The requisites in a good Speller are: — i. that it 
present in their organic order and relationship 
all the alphabetic elements of the language in all 
the diversity of forms in which they respectively 
appear, 2. that it exemplify each of these phonic 
elements in a sufificient number of carefully 
selected words in their diverse combinations, 
which shall serve as type-words for the entire 
vocabulary ; 3. that it distribute the entire vocab- 
ulary into classes with these type-words as 
models or specimens, as a botanist distributes 
the entire flora into classes represented by a 
comparatively few specimens, so that a full knowl- 
edge of the type-words gives a full knowledge of 
all the words in the language, making good spell- 
ing comparatively a simple practicable attainment ; 
4. that it be in exact method throughout, pro- 
ceeding from the simpler to the more com- 
plex combinations; 5. that it group the selected 
representative or typical words in lessons con- 
venient for use ; 6. that the grouping be such 
as to be a guide to the pronunciation of all 
the words in the respective groups and also, 
subordinately, to exhibit in apparent irregulari- 
ties the source of departure from the normal 



132 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

form of the word ; 7. that it be so compact, 
while yet covering the entire vocabulary, that 
the average mind at the middle of the primary 
stage of general education may become a profi- 
cient in the art of spelling. This, it is believed, 
may be effected in a period of two or three 
years with two lessons a day of school time, one 
third of which shall be in review. 

7. Oral Spelling needs to be supplemented by 
abundant, systematic drill in writing lessons. 
The exercises in English will afford the oppor- 
tunity requisite for this necessary drill in spell- 
ing. 

II. Reading. 

1. Reading is an art, and, as such, involves the 
three essential constituents in all art : — idea to be 
rendered, matter in which it is to be rendered or 
vocal sound, and the actual embodiment of the 
idea in the sound. §§ 44-49. To read well 
involves, thus, I. knowledge of the thought and 
experience of the feeling to be rendered ; 2. 
practical mastery of the voice ; 3. skill in actual 
embodiment of the idea in the vocal sound. 

2. All vocal sound in speech is essentially 
musical, ever appearing under the relations of 
pitch. 

3. Particularly, the syllable is the primary 
unit of speech. The fundamental lav/ is : — 
Every syllable has a dete7'minate movement in 
pitch. 



MENTAL EDUCATION. I 33 

4. The pitch-intervals in speech are the tone, 
the semi-tone, the major and minor thirds, the 
falling fourth, the rising fifth, and the octave. 
These intervals occur as simple slides or as waves 
in diverse combinations of slides. The transi- 
tions in pitch from syllable to syllable, in other 
words, the skips in speech are also through the 
intervals enumerated — the semi-tone, the tone, the 
major and minor thirds, the fifth, and octave. 

5. Education in singing is conditional and 
helpful to the best education in reading. The 
one should be in closest union with the other. 

6. A text-book is alike indispensable for 
effective training in each. To learn in either case 
only by rote — by imitation — is a by-gone in edu- 
cational history. 

7. The text-book in reading should present 
in progressive, orderly methods, i. exercises in 
vocal culture — Phonics ; 2. exercises in proper 
orthoepy or the pronunciation of words ; 3. ex- 
ercises in proper elocution or the actual render- 
ing of thought in speech. It will need of course 
to be adapted to the capacity of the learner, 
rudimentary while methodical and thorough for 
the beginner, with correspondingly higher 
grades for the more advanced. Separate text- 
books may answer best for the several stages 
mentioned. 

8. Vocal culture will seek to develop vocal 
power or volume and compass of voice together 
with fitting quality, as purity and mellowness. 



134 



EDUCATIONAL WORK. 



9. Orthoepy or word-pronunciation involves 
I. Articulation ; 2. Syllabication ; 3. Accentua- 
tion. It is indirectly taught in spelling lessons, 
as already indicated. 

10. Elocution proper embraces i. the pos- 
session of the thought to be rendered in its own 
relationships and its modifications by feeling ; 
and 2. skill in the divers movements of the voice in 
rendering thought and feeling according* to these 
relations and modifications. 

11. Rudimentary education necessarily occu- 
pies itself mainly with the first of these two req- 
uisites — getting ready and accurate possession of 
the thought from out of the printed form. 

12. The true education, here as everywhere, 
proceeds from element to element, securing prac- 
tical mastery of each, in scientific method 
through the entire science or art. The thorough, 
scientific way is as a rule the shortest, easiest, 
only satisfactory way. The well-trained reader, 
as the well-trained speller, will ever feel assured 
as to the character of his performance ; — will 
know when he reads well, that he reads well, and 
how it is that he reads well. 



III. Writing. 

I. Penmanship is an art to be acquired by 
judicious orderly practice. The text-book or the 
instructor must furnish the copy ; the practice 
will be chiefly in imitation. The characters of a 



MENTAL EDUCATION. 1 35 

good style in penmanship are, i. Beauty in the 
form of the letter, requiring uniformity in the 
similar parts with contrast in direction and 
length of line and in shading ; and 2. facility in 
executing. 

2. Training should be by single elements in 
order: I. Straight lines; 2. curved lines ; 3. con- 
nections between different letters. 

3. Esthetic principles in penmanship require, 
First, uniformity in all like elements or charac- 
ters, as in the slope for all the straight lines as 
also for all the curves and for the loops in the 
looped letters ; in length of like elements above 
or below the line ; and the like. 

Secondly, that the slope of the curved be 
adapted to the slope of the straight lines and of 
the looped letters. 

4. The slope may vary from the nearly perpen- 
dicular when the curves must be nearly circular 
to the nearly horizontal when all the curves will 
be very flattened ovals. When the general slope 
is between these extremes, the curves will vary 
correspondingly from the more circular with 
nearly perpendicular lines to the oval becoming 
more flattened with the greater slope. Neither 
the absolutely perpendicular, nor the absolutely 
circular, nor the sharply angular is aesthetic. 

5. Practice in penmanship may most usefully 
be made subsidiary to the acquisition of the art 
of Book-keeping — an art in which all should be 
trained so far as. to be able to keep fair accounts 



136 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

of money values received and expended. Its 
simplest form is that of cash received and ex- 
pended. When other possessions are added, 
note of the source from which received and the 
object on which expended, with simple indexing 
will be added accordingly. Two books, which 
may indeed conveniently except in commercial 
usages be comprised in one, suffice for ordinary 
purposes: i. the Journal, which contains in sim- 
plest terms the record of the transaction, giving 
the source from which the money value con- 
cerned is received — the credit side of the account, 
and also the object to which appropriated — the 
debit account ; 2. the Ledger, which simply indi- 
cates the page of the journal where the transac- 
tion is recorded and also tabulates the values on 
their respective debit and credit sides. 

IV. Arithmetic. 

1. Arithmetic is the doctrine of numerical 
quantity ; as Geometry is the doctrine of spacial 
quantity. 

2. Arithmetic as a science is studied only by 
the thinker ; it is as an art that it chiefly, if not 
wholly, commands the attention of the educator. 
Its aim or end is intelligent practice rather 
than increase of knowledge ; skill rather than 
science. 

3. Its characteristic method is continued and 
abundant practice in orderly progress from the 



MENTAL EDUCATION. 1 3/ 

simplest to the most complex with clear under 
standing of the nature and grounds of every 
process. 

4. The one commanding condition of success- 
ful study is such familiar understanding of 
every step from beginning to end, such per- 
fect practical mastery of each in succession, as 
will make the mental movement in compli- 
cated operations, as it were, automatic or in- 
stinctive. 

5. Quantity, as quantity, admits of the single 
modification by increase or decrease. In the last 
analysis all arithmetical changes are resolvable 
into such increase or decrease by a single unit — 
into adding or subtracting one. The mind that 
can intelligently add one to a quantity or take 
one from it has the germ of all arithmetical 
capacity and skill. 

6. The body of arithmetical teaching and 
training consists in the unfolding in orderly suc- 
cession of the processes by which numerical com- 
putation may be abbreviated or simplified ; Digi- 
tal Notation being a contrivance for com- 
pendious expression of units in quantity, Multi- 
plication being only compendious addition, 
etc. 

7. A fundamental principle in all numerical 
processes requires that the units concerned be 
regarded as belonging to the same class of 
objects ; we cannot add two dollars to two 
bushels of wheat, the sum being neither four dol- 



138 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

lars nor four bushels. All quantity rests on the 
fundamental attribute of all thought — Identity 
— and presupposes it, § 56. 

8. As lying thus near the lowest foundations 
of all thought or knowledge, the science of quan- 
tity possesses the highest degree of certitude in 
human thought. It excels accordingly all other 
sciences in presenting to the forming mind the 
ideal of exactest and surest knowledge. In this 
field of human experiences there reigns absolute 
certainty, so long at least as thought is real and 
is true to itself. Absolute skepticism, universal 
doubt, is annihilated in the domain of mathemat- 
ical truth. 

9. The introductory step in the study of 
mathematics generally and in that of each suc- 
cessive part of it, is the learning of the notation, 
including the representatives used of the quanti- 
ties, as in arithmetic the digital, and in algebra 
the literal and in the higher branches the func- 
tional character or signs and the like, and also 
the indications of the processes and relations as 
the symbols or signs of phis and inimis, those of 
division, of fractional expression, involution and 
evolution, etc. Thoroughness here, that shall 
amount to the most familiar practical mastery, is 
imperatively requisite. 

10. The progress in the study needs to be 
characterized throughout by the same thorough 
work. The study is thus made easy, attractive, 
successful. 



MENTAL education: 1 39 



V. Grammar. 

1. *' Grammar," says Ben Jonson, '' is the art 
of true and well speaking a language ; the writ- 
ing is but an accident." 

2. A proper science of a language can be 
advantageously studied only in the most 
advanced stages of education. The genesis and 
history of a language in itself and its connections 
with other languages^ its elements and forms and 
laws, are beyond the period of ordinary public 
instruction. 

3. Grammar as an art is of a twofold character 
according as it deals with the interpretation or 
with the construction of discourse. We have 
accordingly Interpretative Grammar and Con- 
structive Grammar. 

4. Speech is the verbal expression of thought. 
Thought is the vital, germinal element ; words or 
language the embodiment which the thought 
takes on in its expression in vocal sound. 

5. As thought is complete only in the act of 
intelligence known as the judgment, the primal 
and elemental speech-form is tJie sentence. 

6. But as speech is rational and therefore 
properly ever involves an end or object, when it 
is regarded in this light or in this reference to a 
rational end, it becomes discourse. 

7. Speech-forming proceeds by the following 
distinguishable stages of accretion : — 



140 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

(i.) It starts from the expiration of the 
breath ; 

(2.) The breath vocab'zed becomes vocal 
sound ; 

(3.) The vocalized breath being articulated 
produces the alphabetic element or letter ; 

(4.) The letter receiving the determinate 
pitch-movement makes the syllable ; 

(5.) The syllable, single or combined, receiv- 
ing significance or idea becomes a ivord ; 

(6.) The word, single or combined, rational- 
ized or uttered for an end, becomes rational dis- 
course. 

8. Grammar, in the broadest sense, embraces 
the two distinguishable parts of (i) the con- 
struction of the sentence or complete thought- 
form ; and (2) the construction of rational speech 
or discourse. The former part of the art is now 
denoted by the term Grammar, as used in the 
narrower sense. The latter part, or the construc- 
tion of proper rational speech or discourse, is 
denominated Rhetoric. 

9. Constructive Grammar, accordingly, in the 
narrower sense, has for its one subject matter, 
the construction of the sentence. It is properly 
applied to one's vernacular tongue. 

10. Interpretative Grammar is properly ap- 
plied to foreign languages ; that is, to other lan- 
guages than one's vernacular. It has a method 
throughout peculiar to itself and entirely differ- 
ent from that of constructive g-rammar. 



MENTAL EDUCATION. I41 

11. The ill-success in teaching Grammar is at- 
tributable chiefly either to the failure to distin- 
guish the science from the art, the science being 
admissible only into advanced education, or the 
failure to distinguish the Interpretative Gram- 
mar from the Constructive Grammar. The 
methods in these arts being just the reverse of 
each other, to confound them is of course to 
prevent successful training in either. 

12. The grammatical sentence is made up of 
three essential elements, (i) that of which one 
thinks or speaks — the subject ; (2) that which he 
thinks or speaks of it — the attribute ; and (3) the 
attributing act or the positive affirming or deny- 
ing of the attribute as belonging to the subject 
— the copula. §52. These thought-forms appear 
normally in the noun, the adjective, the verb. 

13. Besides these three principal and ever 
essential elements, there are the subsidiary ele- 
ments, found to be of convenience for limiting 
or modifying respectively the several principal 
elements ; (i) the modifier of the subject, the 
grammatical adjective being the natural speech- 
form for this modifier ; (2) the modifier of the 
attribute or ///t' adverb; (3) the modifier of the 
copula or proper verb form, called the modal. 

14. In addition to these constituents entering 
into the sentence, there are words expressing 
relations either between the elements named or 
between sentences — prepositions and conjunct io7is, 
sometimes, but inadequately, \.QVVc\Qd form-words. 



142 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

15. Still further, besides these normal forms 
there have crept into speech certain irregularities 
or anomalies, for the most part through the con- 
flict of different principles of language — abnormal 
grammatical forms. 

16. It should ever be borne in mind that the 
vital element in the art of true speaking, is the 
thought to be expressed. All speech-forms are 
properly thought-forms put into articulated and 
musical sound. All training in the art should 
proceed from the thought ; this is essential. 
The one dominating question throughout is : 
Having a thought to express, how am I to ex- 
press it properly in language ? Education pro- 
poses no question more inspiring to the ambition 
of a youthful mind. 

17. It is obvious from this synopsis of the 
sentence, its nature, its constituents, its normal 
and abnormal forms, that training in " the art of 
true and well speaking," rightly conducted, is 
simple and rational ; that it is practicable even in 
the early stages of primary education, and may 
be prosecuted with satisfaction to both teacher 
and pupil ; that every step in the progress ex- 
plains itself, each grammatical form exhibiting 
its own nature and use ; that the needful prac- 
tice, may be made perfectly simple, proceeding 
element by element to the most complicated 
expressions of thought. Grammar, as such a 
constructive art, becomes thus a study both prac- 
ticable and attractive ; of the highest disciplinary 



MENTAL EDUCATION. 1 43 

character : and the most important for the uses 
and ends of a true education. 

18. Rhetoric is the complementary of Gram- 
mar as a constructive art and its proper consum- 
mation. The governing principles of training in 
it are obvious from the summary exposition just 
given. 

(i.) The training should always bring in the 
rational end or object in speaking or writing — in 
all rational discourse. The one grand explana- 
tion of the prevalent repulsiveness of " composi- 
tion-writing " to the pupil, is this : that it re- 
quires of him what is most irrational or self-con- 
tradictory, — to do a rational act without any 
rational end or aim in it. To write a narrative 
of some event of interest or a description of a 
scene or object, or a defense of an avowed opin- 
ion, or a persuasive request for a favor is easy and 
attractive, simply because inspired by a rational 
object. 

(2.) The thought must be in the possession 
of the mind before it can be expressed. All 
rhetorical training should begin with the thought 
as connected with the object for expressing it — 
in other words, with the theme considered in 
reference to the object in presenting it, and 
should never suffer it to drop out of view or relin- 
quish its control over the whole process. 

(3.) The few distinguishable objects of ra- 
tional discourse and the few distinguishable proc- 
esses by which these several objects are to be 



144 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

attained in discourse, permit the general divisions 
of the art for the study of all rhetorical forms 
one by one in the concentrated light of the nature 
and laws of each. 

Invention, or the supply and specification 
of the thought to be expressed in reference to 
the object of the discourse, thus constitutes the 
primary and governing part of rhetoric. Style 
becomes subordinate and subservient ; and so 
criticism becomes intelligible. Earnest purpose 
to express well defined thought easily satisfies 
itself whether the verbal expression is or is not 
exactly what it should be in its highest perfec- 
tion of form. 

19. The exercises in constructive grammar or 
the art of expressing thought in one's vernacular 
tongue should begin in the earliest stages of 
education. They will serve at the same time 
as exercises in spelling and in writing. They 
should be frequent and systematically progres- 
sive. After preparatory practice in writing words 
more for training in spelling and penmanship, 
the simple sentence in its simplest form will be 
undertaken and will be continued through the 
entire complement of distinct grammatical ele- 
ments and forms. In this progress, however, the 
simpler rhetorical forms may be introduced — 
as the narrative or the descriptive — preceded by 
the primary forms of punctuation and its rules 
which should be thoroughly mastered at the start. 
In all these more rhetorical exercises, even the 



MENTAL EDUCATION. 1 45 

most simple, the pupil should be made aware of 
the tJiougJit which he is to communicate — the 
tlieme as, in narrative, the event or the incident. 
To this he may be guided by some literary extract 
read to him, or some reference to his own experi- 
ence or observation, or reading. He should also 
be made aware that in writing he has an object 
to accomplish, as in narrative to communicate in 
the best way he can his knowledge of the theme 
supposably to some one else. TJicnie and object 
should thus both be dominant in his mind, guid- 
ing and inspiring, as in a truly rational pro- 
cedure. 

III. MORAL EDUCATION. 

% 57. The will is the last of the three great 
functions of the human mind in order of devel- 
opment. Its action is conditioned both by 
that of the function of form and of the intelli- 
gence, as it cannot move until called forth by 
some object which can reach it only through 
the sense or function of form, nor move with any 
assurance of success except in knowledge of its 
object and of the way of reaching it to attain 
its end. The function is the finishing element in 
the constitution of mind and its crowning glory. 
It is the immediate former of character in man 
and so the prime determiner of his destiny. It 
demands accordingly as imperatively as either of 
the mental functions, the care of the educator. 
By whatever agency the work is carried on, the 
10 



146 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

science of education has for its proper province 
to unfold the general principles and methods by 
which the work must be governed. It must 
accordingly set forth the essential characteristics 
and relationships of this function and its generic 
laws and forms. 

The training here begins in earliest infancy and 
continues through life. Soon as the opening life 
becomes capable of communicating with outer 
realities, the moral culture may and in all wisdom 
should begin. The absolute dependence at 
beginning life involves subjection to the will of 
others ; and the gentlest touch of constraint as 
the change of posture or the turning of the 
finger suffices for the most part to enforce this 
subjection. Such early lessons followed out con- 
sistently and perseveringly are the best and most 
efficient inculcations of morality. Character, 
good or bad, takes its start in the nursery. Intel- 
ligent and faithful training here is the best guar- 
anty that the future life shall be what it ought to 
be. Dependence is the best school of obedience 
which is of the very essence of duty and of all 
morality. This condition, so favorable if not 
needful for moral training^ continues through the 
entire period of education. All along the way by 
example as well as by precept and by enforce- 
ment of conformity to higher rule, this teaching 
is given. Education everywhere must of neces- 
sity influence morals. 

§ 58. The essential characteristic of the will is 



MENTAL EDUCATION. l^^J 

that it is directive. It is directive in the largest 
sense. It directs the entire mental activity, 
summoning forth its energy and so determining 
the intensity of its action ; directing this or that 
function on this way or that, by selecting the 
object of action. It directs the whole mind in 
the entireness of its energy ; it also directs each 
functional department, the sensibility and imag- 
ination and the intelligence, as also itself in sub- 
ordinate, executive action. This directing power 
seems to exhaust its active nature ; if at least we 
include in it its permissive work. It is here indeed 
that its presence is to be discovered to a large 
extent. The human will permits probably far 
more than it positively orders, idly suffering the 
spontaneous or habitual flow of feeling and 
thought and quietly leaving the active nature of 
the mind to its own trend or appetency. It is 
a great part of the work of education to train the 
will to faithfulness in its ofifice-work of actually 
ruling over the whole man so far as may lie 
within its nature. 

§ 59. The fundamental and comprehensive 
law of voluntary or moral action is derived at 
once from the deepest principle of life — that each 
member minister beneficially to the perfection 
of the whole organism and inclusively of every 
part. To become perfectly what it was designed 
and fitted to be is the one grand all-inclusive 
principle or law of all life. So the one all-inclu- 
sive principle or law of human life is that it be- 



148 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

come what it was made to be, that is, become 
what it ought to become. It is the ground and 
significance of oughtness, of obligation. We have 
thus the highest, broadest principle of morals, 
the maxim of universal reach : Be and become 
your best in actual ministration to the truest 
good of every object within your reach, which 
good is simply the highest perfection of^its na- 
ture ; thereby and thereby only do you effect 
your own highest good, which is, the perfection 
of your own nature. The principle of life in- 
volves a reciprocal inter-dependence between all 
the members. Each particular member therefore 
can secure its own highest perfection only 
through a favoring condition of soundness and 
organic helpfulness in the other parts of the 
whole. The maxim may for practical conven- 
ience receive a broader statement : Be ever at 
your best in ministering to the good — tJie true per- 
fection — of your own character and of that of all 
around you. 

The generic forms of all voluntary or moral 
activity are best determined in reference to the 
respective objects towards which it is exerted. 
These are for man, self, felloiv-nien, God. Such 
is the comprehensive classification of all duty — 
personal, social, religious. 

The work of education is thus precisely indi- 
cated. In all fitting ways and at all times it is to 
seek to nurture up and train to a settled control- 
ling habit of duty. The modes by which this 



MENTAL EDUCATION. 149 

training is to be effected are summarily threefold. 
First, by exemplification ; Secondly, by formal 
precept ; Thirdly, by steadfast enforcement of 
obedience. 

§ 61. Moral training begins in exemplification 
of duty. The very idea of duty, of its nature 
and reality, and its specific forms comes first to 
the child from others. It is a natural instinct in 
the new human life to imitate — to do and be 
what others do and are. Here also is enlisted 
the immeasurable power of sympathy, that works 
as silently as resistlessly. All the respective 
virtues and graces of character are thus best 
inculcated through sympathetic, judicious, syste- 
matic exemplification, as courage, patience, gen- 
tleness, courtesy, fairness, kindness, piety. So 
those more conditional leadings up to higher 
duty, its supports and fortresses, the duties of 
punctuality — of strict observance of all the 
relationships of time, and of special order 
— the observance of all the demands of place — 
require for their inculcation, to be exemplified 
everywhere. '' A time for everything and every- 
thing in its time," and '*a place for everything 
and everything in its place," are most important 
maxims in moral training. 

2. Formal /r^<:r// is more or less needful here 
as in all training. The indication of the duty to 
be done, at the time as at all times, and where as 
well as when, is equally necessary here as in all 
education and frequent opportunity is furnished 



150 EDUCATIONAL WORK. 

all along the course of mental training for direct 
precept, more or less specific. The extended 
study of moral science or ethics will of course be 
deferred to an advanced stage of education. Still 
not a little may be accomplished in indoctrinating 
a younger pupil in the general principles of 
morality. Reverent devotion to God and sympa- 
thetic beneficence to men, as the grand compre- 
hensive law of human duty, and its subordinate 
principles of moral action, may be inculcated in 
more or less specific application to every-day 
conduct and life, in ever recurring opportunity, 
perhaps more effectively than through extended, 
systematic and merely doctrinal instruction. 
Religion, morality, it should be remembered, is 
a practice or life, not a knowledge. 

3. The firm enforcement of duty is the third 
and a most effective way of moral training. It 
reveals the fact and nature of authority as reach- 
ing to all moral beings, and the necessity of 
ready and faithful obedience. The rewards and 
punishments that may be brought to its support 
will exemplify the motives to this obedience. 

In order that this exercise of authority in the 
enforcement of duty may be most effective in 
moral training it is obvious that the authority 
exercised should be grounded and directed in 
reason. Only a reasonable authority can avail 
for its good with a rational nature. The right to 
exercise it must exist and must be recognized. 
It must be restricted to its proper sphere. The 



MENTA L ED UCA TION. I 5 I 

administration of it must also be in itself a 
rational procedure. It must accordingly be in 
sympathy. — in genuine kindly interest, neither in 
excessive passion nor in selfish indifference and 
recklessness or as mere matter of form. It must 
be intelligent of the character and need of the 
subject, of the fitness of the occasion, of the 
mode and degree of its exercise. It must more- 
over be with clear discernment of the end and 
design and be adapted to accomplish this end. 
It must in short be sympathetically and intelli- 
gently purposive or with express aim and intent. 
Again, the administration of authority in edu- 
cation must be supreme in its sphere. It is re- 
ported of an English schoolmaster that when one 
day his school was visited by King George IV. 
he received his majesty with just the ordinary 
courtesy between equals and continued his in- 
structions as usual. But when the king took his 
departure the schoolmaster followed him outside 
of the hall and on his knees begged his majesty's 
forgiveness, alleging his warmest loyalty and 
apologizing for his seeming disrespect by saying 
that unless his scholars believed that he was su- 
preme master over them in the school-room they 
would be entirely uncontrollable. There was 
true philosophy in this. If parents or guardians 
intervene, the intervention of itself terminates so 
far the relation between teacher and pupil. The 
teacher is nothing without the authority pertain- 
ing to his office, § 14. 



152 EDUCATIONAL WORK'. 

Further, this administration of authority must 
ever maintain and evince a steadfast confidence in 
its effectiveness — that it will be obeyed. Such 
quiet manifestation of confidence on the part of 
the educator in the dutifuhiess and right behavior 
of his charge is an indispensable means of effect- 
ing it. 

Once more, in order to the full effectiveness of 
this administration of authority, it must be con- 
sistent and firm ; vacillation and fickleness are 
fatal to rational authority. 



BOOK III. 

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY — EDUCATIONAL LIMITS. 

§ 62. The work of education, as a rational 
procedure and as dealing with rational natures, is 
necessarily shaped and determined by the ends 
or results that are proposed either generally or 
specially. The consideration of this teleological 
characteristic acts back on the factors concerned 
in the work, determining their character and 
respective qualifications and on the work itself 
determining how it must proceed. All growth is 
towards an end or result ; and it is the compre- 
hensive function of education to secure this end. 
Every living thing bears in its own being in ref- 
erence to its environment the idea of what it was 
made and fitted to become ; it has its own type- 
form or norm. The comprehensive law of its 
life is to attain this type-form in its highest pos- 
sible perfection. There is such a type-form or 
153 



154 EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

norm attached to man as a living, growing, but 
specifically rational being. The highest law of 
growth and consequently of education to him, 
thus, is as before indicated, § 59, that he become 
his best and ever hold himself at his best in 
sympathetic and intelligent beneficent ministry to 
himself and his fellow beings ; — in other words, 
perfect to the utmost of his power his character 
and condition. The grand importance and 
broad significance of this law of growth and edu- 
cation are forcibly presented to us in the follow- 
ing quotation from Condorcet : — 

" If," says he, '* the indefinite improvement of 
our species is a general law of nature, man 
ought no longer to regard himself as a being lim- 
ited to a transitory and isolated existence, des- 
tined to vanish after an alternative of happiness 
or of misery for himself and of good and evil for 
those whom chance has placed near him ; but he 
becomes an active part of the grand whole and a 
fellow laborer in a work that is eternal. In an 
existence of a moment and upon a point in 
space, he can by his works, compass all places, 
relate himself to all the centuries, and continue 
to act long centuries after his memory has dis- 
appeared from the earth." 

Education in its prosecution of this high aim 
is, however, like all things human, subject to 
divers limitations. Growth itself has its own 
limits ; it proceeds by stages ; it changes with 
progress both its direction and its processes. With 



INTRODUCTORY— EDUCATIONAL LIMITS. I 55 

right factors doing legitimate work in their inter- 
action, the consideration of this modifying char- 
acteristic of growth necessitates a modifying 
direction in the work of education. It becomes 
necessary for the science of education to exhibit 
the character and effect of this modification as 
supervening the normal procedure. Further, the 
work of education is subject to a limitation or 
interruption of its service by reason particularly 
of inadequate means or of extreme necessities of 
condition on the part of its pupil. 

Still again, this work is subject to modifica- 
tion by reason of the necessity of its fitting for 
the manifold diversity of callings and occupa- 
tions in the social life and conditions of men. 
The respective modifications thus required, in a 
system of education aiming generally at the per- 
fection of human character and condition, will be 
exhibited in the following chapters of this book. 



CHAPTER II. 

GROWTH PERIODS. 

§ 63. The fact that in all true growth each 
step is preparatory to what is to follow suggests 
a twofold law for regulating all educational 
work ; — First, it should always be previsio7iaL 
Nothing should be done at haphazard or at the 
dictation of mere convenience or of accidental 
circumstance ; but everything arranged and done 
for the better promotion of the succeeding 
growth. Secondly, the work should so perfect 
and assure every step of progress already made 
that it shall be in fact a basis of advance and a 
help to it. Experience abundantly shows that 
not only is a large portion of precious educa- 
tional time wasted by negligence here, but that a 
large portion of the failures in advanced educa- 
tion are attributable to this neglect. Not infre- 
quently is the despairing confession thus made 
in respect to mathematical studies: "I never 
could understand mathematics : it is utterly use- 
less to try the study ; I hate it." The trouble 
arises generally from a failure to master the 
beginnings of the study ; for nothing can be 
more certain than that the knowledge of quan- 

156 



GRO IVTH PERIODS. I 5 7 

tity is about the first and easiest attainment, 
since this category is about the lowest and most 
comprehensive of all the categories of thought, 
so that there must be absolute want of intelli- 
gence or thinking capacity if there be inability 
to understand its nature and applications. All 
numerical quantity starts from the simple "one 
and one " and under the guidance of this princi- 
ple runs through its grand career. The human 
mind readily apprehends this principle, and by 
its own laws of growth can march along step by 
step with all the progressive developments of the 
numerical principle. Sir Isaac Newton avows 
respecting himself that whatever others might 
think of his labors they were to him but as a 
child playing along the shore picking up pebble 
by pebble and shell by shell. Another eminent 
mathematician, when asked how he won his 
remarkable skill in these problems modestly 
replied, *' I do not know how else than by simply 
mastering each step as I went along." To 
advance the learner by easy and assured stages 
must be a leading principle in effective training. 

The principle is corroborated by a considera- 
tion of the successive changes in the rational life 
of man. Childhood is volatile ; it is passively open 
and receptive to whatever addresses it. Youth 
is versatile ; it turns with an impulse from 
within to the objects around it. Mature life is 
conformative ; it adjusts itself with a will and 
purpose of its own to circumstances. Old age 



158 EDUCATIONAL KESULTS. 

is obdurate ; it persists in its own way and 
after its own judgment and inclination, and is 
slow to learn what is new. The marvelous 
wisdom of nature is seen in these appoint- 
ments, which aim at securing breadth and 
symmetry, agility and circumspectness, firmness 
in wise compliance with urgent conditions, - 
and tenacity of acquisition. The great law of 
habit reveals itself conspicuously in these ordi- 
nances of nature. 

If we turn to the medium of interaction 
between the two prime factors in education — the 
studies pursued — we find a full measure of adap- 
tiveness to correspond with these demands of 
growth and pupilary age. Esthetic and moral 
training we have regarded more as incidental to 
intellectual culture in general education ; but in 
both departments mental growth proceeds step 
by step in manifold successive stages of instruc- 
tion adapted to age and capacity. The universe 
of truth and knowledge, which is the means of 
intellectual training, readily submits to indefinite 
partition and reduction down to the most ele- 
mentary and the most minute. Scientific treatises 
and educational text-books abound in all grades 
from the most rudimentary to the highest scien- 
tific or philosophical and from the most frag- 
mentary to the most encyclopaedic. The same 
is true to a large extent of manuals in aesthetic 
and moral training. The one vast whole of 
knowledge may be separated into smaller wholes 



GROWTH PERIODS. I 59 

each having a completeness of its own, to an 
indefinite degree. 

§ 64. In these views we discover at once the 
practicability and the regulative laws of a cur- 
riciiliun of instruction. First, it must be care- 
fully adapted to the ever changing capacity of 
the learner. To every advance in proficiency 
there should be elevation and reach in the char- 
acter of the study. The number of studies, also, 
must lessen with progress in age ; the volatility 
of childhood demanding during the same day 
manifold exercises each of but a few minutes of 
duration, forbidding all prolonged strain of exer- 
tion and imposing incessant flutterings of effort 
in every direction with frequent reliefs of abso- 
lute rest. It was a very judicious thing to pro- 
vide in a common school mattresses for the 
younger scholars to be used as the need of rest 
should indicate. The number of studies may be 
lessened gradually with the increase of age and 
proficiency. 

Secondly, a wise curriculum must measure 
itself off into definite stages of study and instruc- 
tion. The length of those stages must be 
governed by the stages of educational life. Each 
stage will of course cover a definite whole of 
knowledge, circumscribed and defined so far as 
may be so as to be distinctly grasped by teacher 
and scholar. The teacher should know definitely 
at each proposed lesson what he is to teach and 
both he and the pupil should know at the end 



l6o EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

of each lesson what and how well the lesson has 
been taught and learned. The whole portion of 
study to be compassed in the week, or month, 
or term, or course, needs to be recognized in like 
manner ; and at the end both teacher and pupil 
should know definitely what has been learned 
and how well. 

Thirdly, a wise curriculum will be throughout 
progressive in its character. Each stage will 
prepare for what follows as well as recognize 
what has gone before ; every step be an 
assured step forward. Growth, proficiency, is of 
the very essence of true education: "first the 
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the 
ear." 

Fourthly, a wise curriculum will both prescribe 
a full complement of study for each stage of its 
course and also co-ordinate the particular studies 
which it comprises. For each stage of profi- 
ciency, it is possible to frame an ideal of com- 
pleteness or perfection to which it should be the 
aim of education to carry its pupil. This ideal 
will embrace not only degree of growth but also 
symmetry of development in all the activities 
under training. The whole being is to be 
sympathetically and proportionably developed. 
The curriculum should respect this demand. 
Further the particular studies prescribed at any 
given stage should be selected and arranged so 
as to be tributary to the general proficiency and 
also helpful and not a hindrance to each associ- 



GRO WTH PERIODS. 1 6 1 

ated study. The principle of recreation or rest 
is applicable here. 

Three special rules for constructing a curric- 
ulum of study may be given in exemplification 
of these principles. 

1. Conditional studies should be placed before 
dependent studies. 

2. Elementary studies should precede the 
more complicated. 

3. A suitable diversity of studies will consti- 
tute the complement of studies, so that all the 
activities under training shall be engaged by its 
fitting object in order to secure both the largest 
amount of active exertion and also a symmet- 
rical and rounded whole of attainment. 



CHAPTER III. 

EDUCATION PERIODS. 

§ 65, There are certain periods determined 
to education from its various relationships' to the 
character and condition of its pupils and to 
society. These periods are characterized by 
certain predominant features which must shape 
and color the educational work to be done and 
indicate the results which should in wisdom be 
sought in them. They vary in character and do 
not admit of very exact and fixed lines of 
demarcation. Four of such periods are of such 
familiar recognition and exhibit such obvious 
and important characteristics that they allow 
and indeed seem to require distinct considera- 
tion. 

The first of these periods may be designated 
the kindergarten period. It is the period of 
childhood ending at the age of about four years. 
It is the age, as we have noticed of dependence 
and of volatility : its home is the nursery. The 
educational work for this period will characteris- 
tically be that of full and equal development of 
all the diverse activities, with the repression or 
extirpation of all buddings of evil. The future 
162 



ED UCA TION PERIODS. 1 63 

of character will be largely shaped by the train- 
ing of this period, more largely perhaps than by 
any hereditary shapings. Art may often super- 
sede nature while working under nature's laws. 
Everywdiere in the promiscuous relationships of 
modern civilization race propensities are over- 
borne and character although more or less 
tinged with the hue of descent, takes on a new 
shape and color from the new associations. 
Genius, as so reputed, is often more the resultant 
of nursery care than of ancestral relations. The 
volatility and pliability of this tender age indi- 
cating that the leading care of training be- 
stowed upon it should be to secure the largest 
and most symmetrical development as its com- 
manding object and aim, make this educational 
period characteristically one of play ; its very 
work will be play. All lessons, all exercises 
should be made to the pupil to assume the 
character of sport, amusement, entertainment, 
only as the period approaches its termina- 
tion, anticipating as it were somewhat of the 
tasking characteristics of the period that is to 
follow. 

§ 66. The second educational period may ex- 
tend eight or nine years from the end of the first 
to the age of twelve or thirteen. It may be 
designated as the PRIMARY period of education. 
It corresponds with the prevailing compulsory 
period under the civil laws. Here comes proper 
tasking, definite assignment of study and prac- 



164 EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

tice. Recreation will take the form rather of 
change of exercise than proper rest ; and play, 
diversion, will be for the most part or entirely 
excluded from the school-room. Now the foun- 
dations begin to be laid for the future. A half 
or more of the period will be predominantly 
spent in rudimentary studies. Spelling, reading, 
writing, the ground rules of arithmetic, absorb 
the thought and consume the time except as, 
mainly for recreation and incidentally, exercises 
are introduced for developing the senses of sight 
and of sound, and also agility and dexterity in 
use of hands and feet, as in drawing, rhythmical 
movements, and the like. The suppleness and 
pliancy of boyhood may also here be availed of 
in giving control of fingers and feet, and, more- 
over, of the vocal organs for future training 
in elocution and in music. It may be wise here 
also to introduce to the articulations of such for- 
eign languages as may need to be acquired in 
after years. It is also desirable for the future 
acquisition of the so-called dead languages early 
to introduce into the mind of the learner the 
truth that, although now dead, these languages 
were once the common speech of living peoples. 
Much of the like anticipatory work may be 
judiciously introduced, although but incidentally, 
at this period. The later portions of the period 
will of course be devoted in part to such studies 
as those of descriptive geography and map draw- 
ing and of elementary history. Holiday, leisure, 



ED UCA TION PERIODS. 1 6 5 

t 

and recreation hours may invite into the fields 
for the cursory study of scenery, of the rocks, of 
plants and flowers. Reading in private and of 
course for entertainment, should be supervised 
and turned towards such as is refining, elevating, 
instructing as well as diverting. This period 
will moreover take on a preparatory character 
looking forward to the period that may follow. 
The great mass, however, of the people, it is 
much to be regretted, are unable from the con- 
straints of poverty, for education necessarily 
costs, to pass beyond the bounds of this primary 
and popular period ; many, alas ! can only hold 
out through the first half of it. This popular 
education should therefore be shaped to this end 
— to give the largest and best results attainable, 
shoving out and subordinating to this end proper 
preparatory work. Much will be gained if in 
this period there can be awakened a desire and 
purpose for the great work of self-teaching in the 
hours of release from necessary labor. The dis- 
tinguished self-made men of the civilized world 
have taken their start from the primary school- 
room. But no primary education can be said to 
have fulfilled its design unless it can send forth 
its pupils with a ready ability to spell well in 
the vernacular ; to read intelligently and intelli- 
gibly and of course with self-gratification ; to 
write legibly and neatly ; to reckon also so far 
as the intelligent keeping of accounts, enabling 
and disposing them to a faithful record of all 



7^ 



l66 EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

moneys received and expended as to their 
amount and also as to the source whence received 
and the object to which appropriated. Regular 
balancings of money accounts are vitally asso- 
ciated with balancings of gains and losses in 
knowledge and in morals. § 56. 

§ 67. The third of the great education periods 
— the period of secondary education extending, 
say, to the age of twenty-two — may be designated 
as the LIBERAL. It is the period of the High 
school and the Classical schools or academies, 
which cover the first half of the period, and the 
Collegiate and so-called Scientific which extends 
over the second half. The training in the first 
part is largely preparatory for the latter part — 
the High School and the Classical Academy look 
largely to the College or the Scientific School. 
To a considerable extent the courses of training 
whether thus preparatory or for general culture 
will be identical. But the fitting for positions 
and occupations in the higher grades of civilized 
life, in which refinement and general intelli- 
gence are dominant, should be a prevalent fea- 
ture ; and this end must shape the curriculum 
throughout. The boy rules in the High School 
and Academy. He requires steady oversight 
and government, protection from harmful influ- 
ences, encouragement in all that is worthy and 
good, while yet still buoyant and hopeful and 
given to hilarity and good cheer. Games of all 
kinds are meet for his healthy development physi- 



ED UCA TION PERIODS, 1 6/ 

cally, intellectually, morally. He puts on the 
manners, the deportment, the hopes and aspira- 
tions of a man as he passes into the college ; and 
manly diversions now take the place of the 
puerile. Playful mischief may be condoned in 
the school boy ; it is intolerable in the collegian. 
The seriousness and grandeur of human life 
loom up now before the eye of the latter, dimly 
yet impressively and instructively. Here as in 
the High School, studies branch as preparatory 
for the higher classical or liberal pursuits and for 
more special purposes. The curriculum can be 
wisely and economically made to minister to 
the highest profit of both classes. The mingling 
of men of various pursuits and conditions is a 
grand object in education as fitting for the hap- 
piest social state. The preparatory studies, look- 
ing to professional or higher literary life, should 
be preparatory, not finishing in their proper ten- 
dency and effect. The future is best prepared 
for by the best use of the means and opportuni- 
ties of the present. To forecaste in the ignorance 
and inexperience of pupilary years, as to the 
particular shaping and character of this future, is 
pretty certain to insure an imperfect ideal, ever 
cramping and lowering. 

§ 68. The fourth of the great educational pe- 
riods, introducing into the higher or professional 
life, may be designated the AVOCATION period. 
Its characteristic is that its one great function is 
to prepare directly for this higher professional 



1 68 EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

life. It is a purely avocational period if it border 
directly on a full completed term of liberal train- 
ing. The curriculum may be modified either by 
the omission of such anticipatory studies or prac- 
tice as have been admitted into the proper 
secondary or liberal school system, or by the 
introduction of such training as has been 
omitted in the earlier periods. Its general char- 
acter still remains : its aim is purely avoca- 
tional, fitting for the permanent pursuits of 
life. 

The diversity of these avocational systems is 
as great as the diversity of callings in human life 
requiring special training or instruction. For the 
man of leisure, the idler or man of no work, and 
the man of pleasure too, education makes ito pro- 
vision, leaving him to '* paddle his own canoe^," 
or sluggishly float down the stream of life. For 
the day laborer, the man of all work, the fag and 
drudge, it only does so much as to make him a 
man to be valued and respected, a worthy citi- 
zen, and possibly capable by self-training of 
rising to high positions of honor and service. 
The man of skill steps in after this gradation in 
training, and now begin proper systems of edu- 
cation. The first to be named is the mechanical 
school. Hitherto little of formal provision has 
been effected or devised for this large field of 
training. The need has been felt and imperfectly 
shown in the incidental or optional features of 
the more general curriculum ; somewhat too in 



ED UCA TION PERIODS. 1 69 

the now well-nigh obsolete systems of appren- 
ticeship [learner-ship]. Recent experience has 
shown that incipient training in these depart- 
ments of industry can be successfully introduced 
into the common schools without serious incon- 
venience or disadvantage. The felt wants of 
society press for a steady improvement and 
enlargement of these educational provisions, 
which may perhaps lead to independent schools 
of training. 

Next to the handicraftsman comes the man of 
business, the merchant in all the numberless 
diversities of his service from the huckster up to 
the great jobber in merchandise, the go-between 
in all grades between producer and consumer, the 
man of money and of commerce generally. The 
Trades-Schools, the Business Colleges, are the 
sporadic representatives of educational work in 
this department of human industry. 

A higher grade of avocation systems of training 
is found in the Professional Schools properly so 
called — the schools of the three so-called learned 
professions — the Clerical or Theological, the 
Legal, and the Medical. Here are demanded 
and here accordingly are provided the educators 
of the highest and broadest intellectual attain- 
ments as well as of the best professional 
skill. They are for the most part purely 
professional, admitting no merely preparator}' 
training. When such preparatory studies ap- 
pear, they appear as incidental and exceptional, 



170 EDUCATIONAL RESULTS. 

and are designed to meet special conditions in 
society. 

Emphatically special and peculiar are the great 
national military and naval schools. The needs 
of the nation require a long, specially arranged 
system of training, characterized all along by this 
one pervading peculiarity of fitting for a national 
use and service. They take up into their own 
hands large parts of the general systems of edu- 
cation. They are professional throughout. 

There remain a large, indefinite diversity of 
avocations for which education has hitherto made 
scanty provision, but which are ever more ur- 
gently pressing their claims for special outfits 
and special instructors. They are crowding them- 
selves more and more into the liberal institutions 
snatching at every opportunity or opening in the 
curriculum and especially in the optional depart- 
ment. They embrace the callings of Journalist 
and Teacher and Author; of Artist and Scientist, 
or Philosopher; of Statesman and Diplomat. 
The advance of civilized society multiplies the 
demand for trained services in all these diverse 
ways. More servants of the public are required 
and at the same time higher and more special 
preparation. The great law of supply and de- 
mand will doubtless in time introduce special 
avocational schools or systems of training for 
each of these departments of service. Already 
we have, in separate institutions or as integral 
parts of University organization, Normal Schools 



ED UCA TION I 'EKIODS, 1 7 1 

for the Teacher, Art Schools for the Musician 
and the Painter, Schools of Philosophy for the 
Cosmopolite in learning and science : and the end 
is not yet. The age is one of progress ; nowhere 
is this characteristic more declared and promi- 
nent than in the Science and Art of Educa- 
tion. 



INDEX 



Esthetic education, lOO ; in the 
personal appearance and car- 
riage, 109; the senses, no; 
in recollection, no; in the 
imagination, in. 

Aim, in education, 86. 

Aphorisms for elementary stud- 
ies, 129. 

Appliances, educational, 49. 

Arithmetic, aphorisms for teach- 
ing, 136. 

Assimilatioti, in nurture, 104. 

Attributes, training in discrimi- 
nating, 122; intrinsic or ex- 
trinsic, 123; categories, 124. 

Authority in teaching, 27, 150. 

Beautiful, the, sole object of 
the function of form, 100; its 
three constituents, 103, 109. 

Categories of thought, 124. 
Character, the ideal in training, 

9; involved in education with 

condition, 38. 
Class association, 53. 
Concept, its nature, 116. 
Curriculum, requisites in, 159. 

Deduction, 3, 118. 
Determination, amplification of 
attribute concept, 117. 

Earnestness in teacher, 25, 86. 

Education, defined, 3 ; respects 
a growth, 4 ; involves the in- 
teraction of three factors, 5 ; 



an ordinance of nature, 14 ; 
its work twofold, 65. 

Education periods, (i) kinder- 
garten, 162; (2) primary, 163; 
(3) liberal, 166; (4) avoca- 
tional, 167. 

Educational aphorisms for ele- 
mentary studies, 129. 

Educational Institutions, 56 ; 
private, 57 ; state, 58. 

Educational results, 155. 

Effective zvork in education, its 
conditions, 80; ( i )sympathetic, 
80; (2) earnest, 86; (3) aim- 
ing, 86; (4) developing, 87; 
(5) provident, 89; (6) precau- 
tionary, 90; (7) with recrea- 
tion, 90. 

Endowment and environment,-^. 

Exercise, in training, 74. 

Form, the function of, embrac- 
ing the sensibility and the 
imagination, 100, 103. 

Generalization^ 2, 117, 126. 

Good^ the, object of the will, 
100. 

Grajumar^ aphorisms for teach- 
ing, 139- . . 

Growth, as object in educating 
work, 88 ; periods in educa- 
tion, 156; as determining 
work to be previsional and 
assuring at every step, 156. 



Habit, law of, 99. 



173 



174 



INDEX. 



Imagination, as active side of 
the function of form, 71, 100; 
three stages in training indi- 
cated, 75; its object, the 
beautiful or perfect in form, 
100; its stages of manifesta- 
tion, 107. 

Induction, 2, 118. 

In te/it'ctuat educa.t\on, 112. 

Intelligence, its one object the 
true, 100 ; its two stages, per- 
ceptive and reflective, 113. 

[udgment, the, as matured form 
of knowledge, 114 ; its three 
comprehensive movements, 
117, 119. 

lecture Teachings as compared 
with oral instruction, 81. 

Logical, methods threefold, 2 ; 
science, its importance to the 
teacher, 127. 

Means and appliances in educa- 
tion, 47. 

Memory, as retentive, 69, 105 ; 
rules in training, 106 ; as re- 
productive, 107. 

Mental education, 100. 

Mind, its threefold functional 
activity, 100. 

Moral activity, its objects, 148. 

Moral Education, 145; stages 
threefold, (i) exemplification 
of duty; (2) formal precept; 
(3) enforcement of duty, 149. 

Morality, its fundamental prin- 
ciple, 148. 

Nature- Teaching, 1 1. 
Number of studies, 52. 
Nurture, as one part of educa- 
tional work, 65. 

Oral Teaching, in comparison 
with the lecture, 82. 

Parental Teaching, 14 ; em- 
braces nurture and discipline, 
17 J should begin early, 17; 



be natural, 18; kindly, 19; 
continuous and congruous, 19; 
authoritative, 21 ; direct, 21 ; 
indirect, 23. 

Perception, its nature, 114. 

Physical Education, 94 ; in min- 
istry to whole body, and in 
subordination to the mental 
life, 95 ; under law of habit, 
96; under natural laws, 97 ; 
the digestive, respiratory, and 
circulatory functions, 98. 

Place and Time, in education, 50. 

Provisional work in education, 
89. 

Punishments, 54. 

Pupil, the, as educational factor, 
-31, 46; generic capabilities, 
32 ; in their intrinsic nature, 
32 ; in their relationships, 38 ; 
specially modified capabilities, 
40 ; in respect to age, 40 ; 
sex, 42 ; personal idiosyncra- 
sies, 44; extrinsic capabili- 
ties, 45. 

Reading, aphorisms for teach- 
ing, 132. 

Recollection, in memory, 107. 

Recreation, its necessity, 90 ; 
should be in adaptation, 91 ; 
educatory, 92 ; contrastive, 
92 ; attractive, 92 ; from work 
to play, 93. 

Retentiveness in mental training, 
69, 105. 

Rtvieiv, profitableness of, 79. 

Rewards avid Punishments, 54. 

Rhetoric, complementary of 
grammar, 143. 

Science, of education, defined, 
I ; its three requisites, i ; its 
twofold methods of apprehen- 
sion, 2 ; method of the sci- 
ence of education, 3. 

Self- Teaching, 7 ; the ideal in 
training, 9 ; self-reliance, 10. 

Sensibility, the, passive side of 
the function of form, 100; its 
characteristics, 103. 



INDEX, 



175 



Sex^ in education, 42. 

Skill in teaching, 27. 

Spelling, aphorisms for teach- 
ing, 130. 

State Institutions of learning, 
58. 

Studies, number of, 52. 

Sympathy in teacher, 25; as 
condition of effective work, 80. 

Teaching Factor, the, 7-30; self- 
teaching, 7 ; nature-teaching, 
II; parental teaching, 14; 
technical teaching, 25 ; its 
personal characteristics, sym- 
pathetic and communicative, 
25; earnest, 25; technical 
skill, 27 ; authoritative, 27 ; 
congruousness, 29. 



Text-books in teaching, 85. 
77//«/&/';/^, its nature, 114; attri- 
bution, 115. 
Time and Place, in education, 

50- 

Training as one part of educa- 
tional work, 68 ; proceeds 
from the elements, not from 
complex wholes, 77. 

True, the object of the intelli- 
gence, 100. 

Will, the, as a function of mind, 
100; its object, the good, 100; 
education of, 145; its essen- 
tial characteristic, 146. 

Writing, aphorisms for teach- 
ing, 134- 



